Exploring Einstein with music

"Superstrings," a lecture and concert event with Oxford physics professor Brian Foster, violinist Jack Liebeck and pianist Charles Own, used music and demonstrations to explore Einstein's theories.

The lecture was sponsored by the physics department as part of the World Year of Physics, a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miracle year," during which his three most influential papers were published.

"When he came to Princeton, Einstein's greatest contributions to community were in his music," Foster said. "He loved music."

As Foster narrated the highlights of Einstein's career with a slide show, Liebeck serenaded the audience with J.S. Bach's Adagio in G minor for first violin.

Foster described some of Einstein's most famous thought experiments, such as the synchronized clock example in which he imagined traveling backwards at the speed of light so that the photons coming back at him made the clock appear frozen.

Developing the theory of a space-time continuum, Einstein derived the basis for his theory of relativity and his well-known equation E = mc2. But gravity distorts the smoothness of Einstein's continuum, a problem he attempted to resolve through quantum mechanics.

Foster pointed out that because we have no "rulers" to measure transitions at the subatomic level, particle physicists gather data about a given target by bombarding it with other, extremely small high-energy particles and then observing the resulting interactions.

"Understanding the structure of baby grand pianos by crashing them together and listening to the noise produced by the collision is similar to how particle physics is done," Foster said, giving an analogy for the process carried out by huge particle accelerators, such as CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Modern physics, Foster pointed out, has revealed Einstein's two fundamental pillars to be "fatally flawed."

"The smoothness of the space-time continuum breaks down when we look with higher and higher resolution," Foster said. He gave the example of a violin that may look smooth from afar but actually has scratches and uneven grains that become visible at a higher resolution.

Acknowledging problems in Einstein's theories, Foster next addressed their potential resolution with the idea of superstrings. He said that although the three "generations" of matter — the quark, lepton and boson — help to explain the universe's evolution with the Big Bang theory, the large discrepancies in the masses of these elementary particles remain unexplained.

"The concept of superstrings can be illustrated with a demonstration of quantum cookery," Foster said, as Liebeck helped him into an apron. A mesh colander modeled the universe with very fine holes corresponding to fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Foster poured flour through the holes, exemplifying how point-like particles cannot be contained in the universe, making a "delicious mess" on the floor of the stage.

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Foster proposed circumventing this problem by making the particles long, rather than point-like, a concept known as particle supersymmetry.

To complete the analogy, Foster introduced uncooked pasta in three different varieties, one for each generation of matter, which he nicknamed "quantum pasta" or "superpasta." Although composed of the same ground-up grain as the flour, these "particles" avoided the problem of the point-like particles, staying contained within the colander.

"Superstrings may be purely philosophical and may have no measurable contributions to our universe," Foster said. However, their existence could be proved if they are large enough to create new, detectible particles when they collide.

"If supersymmetry exists, the subatomic particles physicists found over the past 50 years are like various notes that can be played on superstrings," the final slide read, as Foster and Liebeck performed a duet believed to have been played by Einstein.