I Wanna Grok

There's a principle you may have heard of that if you truly understand something, you should be able to explain it to a six-year-old. If you can't, then you don't really understand it as well as you think you do.

Personally, I think that's a bit harsh. After all, if it were true, we'd have much more educated six-year-olds. It would be more accurate to say that you should be able to explain something to another adult. Of course, that doesn't reflect well on our university professors: Their job is essentially to understand things and explain them to others. Given their success at the latter, it doesn't give me confidence to the former.

That brings me to a sudden realization: I don't believe in String Theory. No, it’s not based on emperical evidence or esoteric mathematics. It's because I don't believe anyone really understands it, because no one seems to be able to explain it.

I know, it's complicated, is hard to wrap your head around. But there are lots of things that are hard to understand. The Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: those are also hard to explain. But it can be done; I've seen people do it. But not String Theory. I've seen and read dozens of explanations, and here's what I've learned:

• All the fundamental particles in the universe are actually strings.
• The strings vibrate.
• Somehow this means that there are lots of other dimensions, but they're really small.

That's it! That's not an explanation. If you were explaining it, you'd also tell us things like:

• How does this help us understand how particles behave?
• What do the vibrations do?
• Okay smartass, what are the strings made of?
• For that matter, why are you explaining something simple (particles that are just little points) with something more complicated (strings)?

Science is all about figuring out how the world works. So the joy of learning about science is to gain a greater understanding of our surroundings. I don't want to hear a few disjointed facts; I want to acquire a mental model of the processes of nature. For whatever reason, String Theory proponents haven't put much effort into this. It's probably just that there isn't much incentive for explaining bleeding-edge physics well. But until someone puts some effort into it, I'm going to assume that String Theory is a massive Emperor's New Clothes situation, where no one wants to admit that none of them get it.

Unfortunately, this kind of explanation-that-isn't seems all too common these days. There's an assumption that if you give the context of a thing, together with some ideas you can drop at parties, that's considered explaining it. But really you haven't learned anything useful: you just know enough to sound intellectual during a superficial discussion, assuming you're talking with other people who don't understand it either.It's really unfortunate that in a society where we can communicate information so easily, we're still not good at spreading understanding.