18 septiembre 2013

Seguir a @pmarsupia

Nada nos gusta tanto en este blog como celebrar el sentido del humor de los científicos. Llevo toda la tarde saltando de alegría después de descubrir esta genialidad de Tim Blais.
Tim es un estudiante canadiense de física teórica que acaba de terminar su tesis de Máster. (Para el que tenga curiosidad en leerla, la podéis encontrar aquí).
Hace unos días colgó en YouTube este vídeo explicando la Teoría de Cuerdas al ritmo de "Bohemian Rapsody" de Queen.
Nota previa: la explicación es bastante hard-core (al menos a mí me ha costado seguirla y se supone que tengo un doctorado en física). Así que si os perdéis, no preocuparse y disfrutad del ingenio. Debajo del vídeo he puesto la letra de la canción. También he añadido enlaces a explicaciones sobre los conceptos y los científicos de los que habla.
Ladies and Gentlemen, disfruten de "Bohemian Gravity" por Tim Blais

Is string theory right?
Is it just fantasy?
Caught in the landscape,
Out of touch with reality
Compactified
On S5 or T*S3
Space is a pure void
Why should it be stringy?
Because it’s quantum not classical
Nonrenormalizable
Any way you quantize
You’ll encounter infinity
You see
Quanta
Must interact
Via paths we understand
Using Feynman diagrams
Often, they will just rebound
But now and then they go another way
A quantum
Loooooop
Infinities will make you cry
Unless you can renormalize your model
Of baryons, fermions
And all other states of matter
Curved space:
The graviton
Can be thought of as a field
But these infinities are real
In a many-body
Loop diagram
Our results diverge no matter what we do...
A Quantum Soup (any way you quantize)
Kiss your fields goodbye
Guess Einstein’s theory wasn’t complete at all!
I see extended 1-D objects with no mass
What’s their use? What’s their use? Can they give us quark plasma?
What to minimize?
What functional describes this
String?
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto)
How to quantize I don’t know
Polyakov!
I’m just a worldsheet, please minimize me
He’s just a worldsheet from a string theory
Reperametrized by a Weyl symmetry!
Fermi, Bose, open, closed, orientable?
Vibrations
Modes! They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Vibrations
They become particles (particles!)
Become particles (particles!)
Become particles (many many many many particle...)
Modes modes modes modes modes modes modes!
Oh mamma mia mamma mia,
Such a sea of particles!
A tachyon, with a dilaton and gravity-vity-VITY
(rock out!)
Now we need ten dimensions and I’ll tell you why
(anomaly cancellation!)
So to get down to 4D we compactify!
Oh, Kahler!
(Kahler manifold)
Manifolds must be Kahler!
(Complex Reimannian symplectic form)
If we wanna preserve
Any of our super-symmetry
(Superstrings of type I, IIa and IIb)
(Heterotic O and Heterotic E)
(All are one through S and T duality)
(Thank you Ed Witten for that superstring revolution and your new M-theory!)
(Maldecena!)
(Super-Yang-Mills!)
(Type IIB String!)
Dual! Dual!
(In the AdS/CFT)
(Holography!)
Molecules and atoms
Light and energy
Time and space and matter
All from one united
Theory
Any way you quantize...