RocketSTEM Issue #7 - May 2014 | Page 15

GREENE: “Well I do think that the ultimate arbiter of truth trumps everything else. In the absence of that, you do use your intuition, your gut feeling – your aesthetic sense of which ideas seem most promising. however, mean that you, based on your personal judgment, feel that they are the ones most worthy of your time and attention in order to be further developed. However, it could well be that things which did not feel intuitively correct, or the right way to go, may ultimately be picked out by nature. Nature doesn’t care so much about our feelings – nature has her own set of rules and it is up to us to try to RS: What is the shape of space and what do you think of dark matter? GREENE: a sense that it doesn’t’ have any intrinsic curviness to it. Rather than being like the surface of a ball, the shape of space is more like that of a tabletop. And that tabletop might go on forever in all directions – that is our best guess at the moment. As for dark matter, the evidence seems to be accumulating over many decades that there is matter in the universe that doesn’t give off light, but it does we know the matter is there - even though we don’t see it – and that sets up a challenge to identify what constitutes dark matter. Brian Greene has published four books to date: ‘The Hidden Reality,’ ‘Icarus at the Edge of Time,’ ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos,’ and ‘The Elegant Universe.’ Credit: Lark Elliott/Vintage Books It is a hypothetical theory, and we are still trying to RS: What do you think of the discovery of the gravitational waves that prove the big bang happened? GREENE: cosmology and the search for the origin of the universe. new observational window into the earliest moments of creation, which Rather than being will be a very powerful, new tool like the surface of a ball, for us to use to understand the universe. However, I also want the shape of space is more to emphasize that we won’t really believe these results like that of a tabletop. until they are independently constituents of dark matter for a number of years - surprisingly yet few years, that issue will be RS: In simple terms, can you explain what string theory is? And that tabletop might go GREENE: on forever in all directions – proposal that tries to reach that is our best guess RS: How are we trying to measure theory of physics. And by that, some of the alternate energies (i.e. at the moment. Einstein meant the theory that from one principle – maybe to be articulated by one mathematical equation – we might (the big stuff), the small stuff, molecules and atoms, and everything in between. is not what we thought it was. Rather than matter being little dot like particles with no internal machinery, String meant to describe everything that happens in the world. www.RocketSTEM .org dark energy)? GREENE: “Well, measuring dark energy is a challenge, but there are very good teams of astronomers that have worked out techniques that often have to do with measuring the properties of going to gain a lot more insight into the nature of dark energy, whether it changes over time, and if it was constant over the whole course of history. 13 13