Many of my more diligent readers are likely familiar with the concept of string theory, since I mention it fairly regularly on this blog. Part of my intense interest over the last year has been motivated by a project of mine - the writing of String Theory for Dummies for Wiley Publishing. I am pleased to announce that my first book, String Theory for Dummies, is now available at your local and online bookstores!

String Theory for Dummies covers all of the major topics in string theory, from branes to supersymmetry to extra dimensions, and looks at how string theory may ultimately explain things such as dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and even their link to more speculative concepts such as parallel universes and time travel.

And it does so in language that is completely accessible to the average reader, regardless of their level of scientific background, with much of jargon (and mathematics) eliminated! You can get a glimpse of it now by accessing the free online String Theory for Dummies Cheat Sheet.

String Theory for Dummies is one of the most accessible and complete guides to this advanced topic written for the general public, written with the assistance of Daniel Robbins, a string theorist at Texas A&M University. You can follow future information - such as speaking appearances - by becoming a fan on my Facebook page.

Over at the About.com Birding site, there's a report that a bird dropped a piece of bread into a cooling unit at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The piece of baguette caused irregularities in the cooling system, which were quickly recognized by technicians. The situation was resolved before there was major damage to the system. (A slightly more technical description of the situation is available on The Register.)

With yet another in a long series of misadventures for the prototype particle accelerator, this lends some anecdotal credence to the speculative idea that "influence" from the future is sabotaging the experiment. Of course, anecdotal evidence isn't enough, and I made an argument that these predictions are logically inconsistent.

I guess nothing will put these speculations to rest until we actually get the LHC up and running and performing the groundbreaking research that physicists are hoping for.

Many recent theoretical physics ideas allow for the possibility that our universe is part of a multiverse - a set of distinct alternate universes. Both particle physics and cosmology, for various reasons, have found this notion

String theory, for example, can (in some interpretations) view our universe as being confined onto a 3-dimensional brane, which allows for other multi-dimensional branes. (In string theory, the total universe has 9 or 10 dimensions, not counting the time dimension, so there's a lot of room for various types of branes ... and therefore various types of universes.)

In the vast majority of these theories, the different universes can't interact. The theories often predict that in the early universe, at the moment of the big bang (or shortly thereafter) minor quantum fluctuations in the fabric of the universe itself expanded rapidly during the period of inflation, resulting in large regions which ended up with different physical laws as they cooled down. (This process of eternal inflation, of which Linde is one of the primary founders, is described in great detail by his colleague Alex Vilenkin in his book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes.)

Still, it's fun for scientists to speculate on these sorts of things. Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at California's Stanford University have done just that. By making some basic calculations, making assumptions about the quantum properties of the early universe at the moment of the big bang, they were able to consider how that universe would have expanded through the process of inflation - where small variations in the early universe expanded rapidly. Each of these regions would have eventually settled into regions which ended up with their own sets of physical laws as it cooled down.

Anyway, their result is the "humungus" number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁷. However, they did point out that the human brain can't really comprehend more than 10¹⁰⁶ pieces of information, so realistically that's the most universes that could be distinguished by a human being, even in principle. (In practice, that's still a heck of a lot of information to process.)

Their original paper, How many universes are in the multiverse?, is available on arXiv.org.

No, it's not the great pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Physicists are kept up by questions about the very nature of space, time, and reality itself ... and New Scientist has broken these concerns down into the "Seven questions that keep physicists up at night." These questions come out of a panel discussion among physicists speaking at the "Quantum to Cosmos" festival, which took place at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, last week. Videos from the festival are available on the website.

Comedy Central's resident faux-pundit, Stephen Colbert, interviewed rock star particle physicist (and People magazine's sexiest physicist) Brian Cox on the October 28 episode of The Colbert Report. Cox was there to promote his new book (co-written with Jeff Forshaw), Why Does E=mc²: And Why Should We Care?

Colbert led into the interview by discussing the recent analysis that concluded the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is failing because of influences from the future which prevent the Higgs boson from manifesting. In the days since I first posted about this analysis, I have thought about it more and come up with a counter-analysis.

The argument proposed is that there is some sort of inherent property that revealing a Higgs boson is "abhorent to the universe." For this reason, influences from the future cause the LHC to fail, to avoid the generation of a Higgs boson.

However, the LHC is only going to cause collisions of about 14 TeV energy ranges, and collisions of this sort (and higher energy levels) happen between particles in nature regularly. Influences from the future don't prevent stars from exploding or streams of high energy particles from colliding with the upper atmosphere. If these collisions result in Higgs bosons, it seems like they'd have be continually thwarted throughout the universe.

The analysis does have one way of being salvaged, however, and it's a far more economical solution. If the Higgs boson is "abhorent to nature," then maybe these sorts of collisions just don't generate it. In this scenario, there's no need to explain some sort of ad hoc influence from the future to prevent the Higgs from being discovered ... there would just need to be some element to the structure of the universe that makes the Higgs directly inaccessible at these energy levels.

Brian Cox rightfully calls these "sabotage from the future" results "bollocks," although he does say that this is more amusing bollocks than the stuff about the black holes devouring the earth (which is a "steaming pile of bollocks").

What he focuses his discussion on is the nature of space and time within the universe. His new book explains Einstein's theory of relativity, which is the foundation upon which all modern physics is built ... because it defines the environment (i.e. spacetime) in which all other science takes place. (Food science is, apparently, not science according to Cox, which tells me that he hasn't seen the Food Network program Good Eats.)

The show is available for free viewing on The Colbert Report website or on Hulu.com. It's the October 28 episode. You can skip directly to the second part, which contains the LHC discussion, or the third part which shows the interview with Cox.

Michael Green has been appointed as the Cambridge University Lucasian professor of mathematics, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton and previously held by Stephen Hawking. Hawking resigned from the university at the end of the 2008-2009 academic year because of a university policy that requires resignation at age 67 (see "Hawking to Step Down from Professorship").  Hawking will, among other things, be working some at Canada's Perimeter Institute, where he has accepted a Distinguished Research Chair position. (The Institute recently named a new building after Hawking.)

So on to his successor, Michael Green, who assumes the professorship on November 1. He has some big shoes to fill - not only has the position been held by Newton & Hawking, but also by Charles Babbage and Nobel-winner Paul Dirac (known as the British Einstein) - but he's created some big footprints himself, as one of the major innovators in the early days of string theory. Together with John Schwarz, Green helped to show that string theory had the ability to cancel many anomalies which had almost doomed the theory, leading to the "first superstring revolution" in the early 1980s.

While Green is certainly worthy of accolades, I've got to confess that I'm a bit startled that he's been appointed to this role. Green is 63, which means that he'll only be able to hold the position for 4 years before retiring himself. Hawking, alternately, was appointed when he was 37, so was able to hold the position for 30 years. Because of the high profile of the position with Hawking leaving, Cambridge University was no doubt under pressure to give it to someone with extensive achievements, and Green is an excellent choice in this regard.

However, I wonder if this isn't partly a sign that there just not that many younger British innovators of mathematical physics to choose from. Hawking was awarded the post in 1979 for work done in the 1960's and early 1970s. Thirty years later, his replacement is largely being recognized for groundbreaking work performed in the early 1980s. What younger British physicist could be appointed the position for groundbreaking work performed in the late 1990s and early 2000s? In four years, when Green is forced to retire, what worthy successor will replace him? What young up-and-comer will have the gravitas needed for this post?

Honestly, I can't think of many, and with a new emphasis on only funding research that provides explicit economic benefit, it's unclear that the British government will foster more theoretical physics innovators in the future. Do you have any suggestions? Leave them here.

So while there are many weird physics theories out there, this latest one linked to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has even my scratching my head. Turns out that physicists Holger Bech Nielsen (of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen) and Masao Ninomiya (of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) have put forth the idea that the LHC will fail to detect the Higgs boson ... because nature itself will intervene to keep this from happening.

Consider this scenario: You travel back in time and (presumably accidentally) cause the death of your grandfather. Therefore you cannot be born and, in turn, you cannot go back in time ... so your grandfather lives. So, you are actually born and go back in time and ... so on and so forth.

This is called the grandfather paradox, and some physicists believe that you could never actually go back in time to kill your own grandfather because of it.  You could, however, go back in time and save your grandfather from being hit by a bus. (Physicist Stephen Hawking has proposed a chronology protection conjecture in an effort to avoid any of this sort of trouble in physics, by not allowing any time travel at all.)

In a sense, Nielsen and Ninomiya are predicting exactly the oppose - that the universe is using time travel to protect itself ... from us. According to their predictions, ("Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider: A Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC") the creation of the Higgs boson would (for reasons that aren't entirely clear) be so troublesome that the universe itself is acting to prevent the Higgs boson from ever being manufactured in an experiment. If the Higgs were created, then there'd be some sort of force in the future which moves backward in time and alters events so that the Higgs is not created.

Though likely proposed as something of an intellectual joke, the fact that the LHC has run into so many problems - technical hold-ups early on, equipment failures, and the recent scandal of a scientist associated with al Queda - helps lend some anecdotal support to the conjecture. It could even explain why the even more powerful Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was abandoned in 1993 by the U.S. Congress.

The idea of the future affecting the present may be on the top of people's minds because of the success of the ABC television series FlashForward, which features a plotline where virtually the entire world experiences memories of the future. This series - and also Lost, for that matter - result in questions about whether events in the future can cause events in the present, and certainly this conjecture brings that abstract issue to the forefront.

For more details on the Nielsen-Ninomiya proposal, you can either read the papers themselves, or check out none other than the New York Times.

One concept of interest in physics in recent years has been the idea of a magnetic monopole - a magnet that doesn't come in a coupled pair of north/south poles, but is just a single pole. In theoretical physics (such as string theory), it is believed that these monopoles spring into exist independently at high energies, such as in the very early universe.

In some materials, such as material called "spin ice," magnetic monopoles can effectively form because the way the magnetic poles align mean that patterns emerge which, as far any measurement is concerned, results in north and south poles moving around independent of each other - exactly as if there were magnetic monopoles moving within the material.

The result of some recent research in this area is that this effect could be used to create an electricity-like phenomenon, which they're calling "magnetricity." It remains to be seen what possible applications magnetricity may yield, but some predictions include the possibility of vastly increasing the ability to store computer information in smaller and smaller sizes of storage devices.

Related Articles:

• New Scientist - 'Magnetricity' observed for first time
• Nature - Measurement of the charge and current of magnetic monopoles in spin ice (subscription required)

Theater majors around the world might do well to take some extra science classes, because science - and physics - are showing up in strange places all around the world of theater these days.

Consider television. While watching House the other day, I wondered if the actors actually understood anything about the string of medical jargon that their characters had to talk about. While this has long been a concern for medical dramas, the dialogue on NBC's The Big Bang Theory is also filled with jardon - this time theoretical physics jargon - which most of the actors probably don't really understand all that much.

And in the world of theater, the staple plays on physics have been Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile and the Tony Award-winning Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. The addition of some new plays featuring physics, or at least physics-enthusiasts, at center stage may show that this idea has some staying power.

One such performance which has gotten a lot of attention is the August debut of the Hector Parra opera Hypermusic Prologue - a projective opera in seven planes. The opera is based upon Lisa Randall's book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, which discusses how the addition of extra dimensions in physics (such as those presented in string theory) help explain some of the physical behaviors of our universe. Randall herself wrote the libretto to the opera (i.e. the words), which makes this a true collaboration between the arts and the sciences.

For Chicago residents, a very different treatment of string theory is coming up in M. E. H. Lewis' Musica Mundana, a new play with a stage reading on Nov. 14, 2009. Here's the description of the play from the website:

A hard-core group of science fiction aficionados escape the mundanity of daily life through filming their own amateur science fiction series. Gradually, however, the sci fi story jumps the track and takes over the main narrative, forcing the storytellers to adapt or be left behind. A serious comedy about Trekkers, string theory, and the meaning of life.

In correspondence with Lewis - a resident playwright at the Chicago Dramatists - I learned that there will most likely be other readings throughout the year, as Lewis finalizes the play with an eye toward a fall 2010 production. For those in the Chicago area, this would be a great opportunity to watch the creative process of making art out of science.

For more discussions on this topic, see also our earlier post Science, Culture, and Art.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I'm always pleased to be able to offer advice to readers on some great physics-themed Halloween activities. Of course, the first one is the classic mad scientist costume, although you can really trick it out by creating a whole haunted science lab. Great for the kids.

On a more educational front, a great topic for teachers and parents to explore with their kids this time of year is dry ice, which can be used to create all kinds of spooky smoke-like effects.

Do you have any suggestions for good Halloween physics topics? What's your favorite physics-themed costume? If you're a teacher, how do you use Halloween in a science classroom? Leave a comment with your thoughts!