Xiaohua: Hello, and welcome to Round Table’s Word of the Week. This week we are going to talk about some science theories that are made known by the film Interstellar.
John: Yeah, not so much made known. I mean these are concepts and ideas that have been around for quite a long time even as early as the 1930s and 1940s, but really what we see with the movie Interstellar which I have not seen yet, we see just a kind of popularization of those ideas. Not to say that Interstellar is the first one to do so, but due to the popularity, especially here in the Mainland, without it we cannot talk about some of them. I want to take the time right now to first describe some very fundamental concepts in the world of mathematics, in physics that informs much of what we saw in Interstellar. So the first is general relativity and a simple explanation of general relativity is the idea on large scales, what happens with large bodies and their influence on other things. So by large bodies, I mean planets, suns, other stars, comets, and things like that. Large massive things in space and how they affect each other, mostly looking at gravity and time.
Xiaohua: 廣義相對(duì)論general relativity基本上講的就是在廣大的空間內(nèi)的一些高密度的天體是怎樣互相之間作用而影響我們的。
John: Then there is quantum physics. So general relativity is attributed to Einstein in the 1930s and 1940s somewhere around there. And then there was quantum physics which was popularized especially in the 1960s and 1970s. So general relativity has everything to do with large massive bodies, again planets, stars, things like that. Quantum physics has everything to do with small things. Things that we cannot perceive with the naked eye, so quantum physics tries to answer the question how is it that an atom stays in atom, how does a molecule stay a molecule, even going future down how does a proton stay a proton.
Xiaohua: 在相對(duì)論之后，又有了著名的量子理論quantum physics。
John: The problem for theoretical physicists so the people who are doing all the math and trying to figure how the math works is that if you try to apply the ideas in mathematics of general relativity to very small things, everything breaks down. And if you try to apply the mathematics of quantum physics and quantum theory on a larger scale, everything breaks down. And so what theoretical physicists had to do was come up with a completely separate system of math and a completely separate idea of how things work. And they call that string theory. So string theory has not been experimentally proven. However, this point is accepted by a wide number of theoretical physicists and mathematicians as a very elegant way of bringing general relativity and quantum physics together.
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Xiaohua: 由于廣義相對(duì)論和量子理論在很多地方是不能同時(shí)成立的，于是理論物理學(xué)家們又延伸出一個(gè)新的學(xué)科，那就是弦理論，也就是string theory。
John: Right, so the idea behind string theory is that you have strings of different shapes and sizes vibrating at certain frequencies. This can be very, very small, smaller than electron, than the smallest particle we know of. Everything basically is made up of different types of strings vibrating at different frequencies and this is where the ideas of branes or membranes and worm holes really start to take shape and actually start to make sense in terms of the mathematics and the actual theory.
Xiaohua: 弦理論的一個(gè)基本觀點(diǎn)就是說自然界的基本單元不是點(diǎn)狀粒子，而是很小很小的線狀的弦string，而弦之間的不同震動(dòng)就產(chǎn)生出不同的基本粒子。另外在弦理論里面還有一個(gè)brane, right?
John: Yeah, brane. It’s just the shortening of the word membrane. The idea there is that the membrane is actually a very elongated string that also has its own vibration. And the idea is all theory. None of this is proven. It’s that our universe in fact could be either just on one brane or could be that we are on many different branes, so the idea is that somehow you take one membrane and you fold it around. It should be theoretically possible to create some kind of gateway between those two. That’s really where the idea of a worm hole really starts to make sense, so people used to think there was this science fiction idea that black holes could somehow be a worm hole, but as far as we know, the physics of that just make no sense, because the black hole is a star that collapses upon itself so quickly because of the way that these forces work, that it just sucks in everything else around it and the thing is as far as we can tell, if everything is actually sucked into the black hole, there is no way that a human could actually survive.
Xiaohua: 而弦理論的存在使得平行空間，也就是蟲洞的存在產(chǎn)生了可能。以前有人認(rèn)為黑洞和蟲洞也許是一種東西，但其實(shí)我們現(xiàn)在知道黑洞是一種超高密度的天體，那么所有的物體在被吸入黑洞之后都沒有辦法逃脫出來，所以黑洞和蟲洞其實(shí)是不一樣的。
John: I want to talk about the speed of light, in about relativity in that sense, because the whole thing with one of the big discoveries of Albert Einstein in terms of relativity was the speed of light. So a lot of science fiction looks at faster than light travel, sometimes abbreviated into FTL. The thing is right now, and this is why worm holes and things like that are so attractive, because according to the physics that in our understanding of the universe now it is virtually impossible to ever actually travel at the speed of light or even faster than the speed of light using what we now have in terms of propulsion technology. Because according to E=mc*2, as you get closer to the speed of light, the energy required increase in such an exponential fashion.