An extraordinary piece – A Fight for the Soul of Science
“As we approach the
practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the
minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances
and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental
constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times
smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that
string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But
it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access.
The problem also
hampers physicists’ quest to understand the universe on a cosmic scale: No
telescope will ever manage to peer past our universe’s cosmic horizon and
glimpse the other universes posited by the multiverse hypothesis. Yet modern
theories of cosmology lead logically to the possibility that our universe is
just one of many.”