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Particle
Properties How do string vibrations produce particle properties? The simplest property of a particle, is its mass.From Einstein's equation, E = mc2, mass and energy are interchangeable. They have a fixed exchange rate, given by the speed of light times itself, c2.
4.3 million tons of matter converted into Energy and Light every second
from the Energy
therefore is produced from mass.
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String
theory explains why one particle is heavier than another. The string of
the heavier particle is vibrating faster and more furiously than the string
constituting the lighter particle. Faster and more furious vibration means
higher energy, and higher energy translates, via Einstein's equation,
into greater mass. Conversely, the lighter a particle is, the slower and
less frenetic is the string vibration. A particle like a photon is a string
with the most placid and gentle vibrational pattern. The
particle's, other properties its electric charge and its spin, are through
subtle features of
Formerly
every vibration pattern in the boson string theory had a whole number
spin: Spin-0, spin-1, spin-2, and so on. However particles of matter like
electrons and quarks don't. They have a fractional amount of spin, spin-1/2.
This revealed a perfect balance, a symmetry, between the vibration patterns
with different spins in the modified string theory. The new vibration
patterns arose in pairs whose spin values differed by half a unit. For
every vibration pattern with spin 1/2 there was an associated vibration
pattern with spin-0. For every vibration pattern of spin-1, there was
an associated vibration pattern of spin-1/2, and so on. Integer
and half-integer spin was named supersymmetry, or superstring theory. |
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