254 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
the difference in mass of the four gauge bosons. Only the new ultra-high
energy accelerators will be able to find it if it indeed exists.
There are also attempts being made now to unite the electroweak
interaction with quantum chromodynamics or the strong interaction.
There is also the work being done in string theory to unite all four
forces. String theory is a heroic attempt to create a unified field theory
in which the gravitational force described by the General Theory of
Relativity could be united with the three basic forces described by
quantum chromodynamics and the electroweak interaction. The basic
idea is that the elementary particles are made up of vibrating one
dimensional strings or membranes embedded in a multidimensional
space, which in some theories has 11 dimensions. The theory has been
pursued for over 30 years and has not been able to make one prediction
capable of experimental testing. Not only that — there is not a unique
string theory but one can with this approach generate 10^500 solutions to
the theory.
In my opinion and that of a number of other physicists much more
prestigious than I, string theory is not a science because it cannot make
any predictions and hence cannot be falsified. For readers who would
like to read a deeper critique of string theory I would recommend my
friend Lee Smolin’s (2006) book, The Trouble with Physics. For those
readers who have read about string theory and might be disappointed by
my rather short treatment of this topic I apologize but I cannot write at
length about an approach I do not believe in. It would be great if string
theory were to work but one has to be realistic. When I conducted my
research in 1965 that led to my PhD at MIT I performed an analysis of
the reaction π– + p^ → πo + n to show the existence of Regge poles,
singularities in the complex angular momentum plane. Regge poles
provided an excellent description of high energy scattering but in the end
they did not advance our fundamental understanding of the nuclear force.
They were not wrong; they just were not very useful as the following
excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Regge theory indicates: “As a
fundamental theory of strong interactions at high energies, Regge theory
enjoyed a period of interest in the 1960s, but it was largely succeeded by
quantum chromodynamics.” C’est la vie for many ideas in physics! This
is the nature of physics, not every good idea in physics turns out to be
useful.