Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 83

Physics is the study of matter and its interactions. Physics tries to understand the behavior of physical systems from the most fundamental laws that we can achieve. String theory could provide these most fundamental laws and explain all of the universe in an elegant way.

One other key principle of physics is the idea that many of the laws that work in one location also work in another location — a principle known as symmetry (we cover this in more detail later in this section and also in Chapter 4). The connection between physics in different locations is just one sort of symmetry, allowing physics concepts to be related to each other. Science has progressed by taking diverse concepts and unifying them into cohesive physical laws.

That’s a very broad definition of physics, but then physics is the broadest science. Because everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or in any way interact with is made of matter and interacts according to some sort of rules, that means physics is literally the study of anything that happens. In a way, chemistry and all the other sciences are approximations of the fundamental laws of physics.

Even if string theory (or some other “theory of everything”) were to be verified experimentally, there would still be a need for other sciences. Trying to figure out every single physical system from string theory would be as absurd as trying to study the weather by analyzing every single atom in the atmosphere.