We are lucky to be living in the midst of a scientific revolution, a revolution that has captured the general public's attention and imagination. It is comparable in many ways to the Copernican Revolution of the sixteenth century, which knocked Earth out of the centre of the solar system. The great hope of this new revolution is to develop a 'theory of everything' - a set of laws of physics that will explain all that can be explained, ranging from the tiniest subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. It is hoped that such a theory will unite the two great achievements of twentieth-century physics, quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity, which are currently incompatible. While a number of 'theories of everything' are being explored, the clear front runner is the elegant and complex string theory.
A number of new scientific instruments will be able to test aspects of the theory over the next few years: the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and priciest particle accelerator ever built, and NASA's GLAST satellite and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which will check whether space is, at the deepest level, a grid rather than a continuum. So it is an ideal time for a book summarizing where string theory and its alternatives stand, especially for people who'd like to learn about it but feel intimated by other offerings.
In The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, readers will find:
Clear explanations of Einstein's theories of relativity and of quantum mechanics.
Discussions of what black holes are and how they're made.
Information on how to visualize extra dimensions and how they might be observed indirectly.
Explanations of the leading competing theories to string theory.
