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| A Story of Ether – Are We Living in a Noodle Soup? | ||
Professor Xiao-Gang Wen |
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| What is light? Where does light come from? Why does light exist?
Physicists have been fascinated by these questions for the last 150
years. At first, people thought that light is a wave in an unknown
medium – ether. Later people dismiss the idea of ether, and
regard light as a wave in “nothing”. During the lecture,
Professor Wen will present a recent attempt to answer the above three
questions: light is a fluctuation of strings. Light comes from the
collective motions of string-like objects that fill our space. Light
exists because our vacuum is a liquid phase of strings. In other words,
the space may be viewed as an ocean of strings, the light as waves
in the string-ocean, and we as fishes in the string-ocean. |
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