Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 61

Unfortunately, as string theorists performed more research, they had a growing problem (pun intended). Instead of narrowing in on a single vacuum (solution) that could be used to explain the universe, it began to look like there were an absurdly large number of vacua. Some physicists’ hopes that a unique, fundamental version of string theory would fall out of the mathematics effectively dissolved.

In truth, such hype was rarely justified in the first place. In general relativity, for example, an infinite number of ways to solve the equations exist, and the goal is to find solutions that match our universe. The overly ambitious string theorists (the ones who expected a single vacuum to fall out of the sky) soon realized that they, too, would end up with a rich string theory landscape, as Leonard Susskind calls the range of possible vacua (see Chapter 12 for more on Susskind’s landscape idea). The goal of string theory has since become to figure out which set of vacua applies to our universe.