ChapterZero

I watched Nova last night: the episode was about Einstein’s search for the grand unified theory and how quantum theory pretty much invalidated his approach to finding a theory of everything, and how string theory represents a possible answer to the question of how to make gravity, which dominates the universe on the large scale, compatible with quantum theory, which dominates the universe on the small scale. I have to interject at this point– why is it that we celebrate Einstein’s theory of gravitation, saying it provides a ‘true’ understanding of gravity, when it doesn’t work at the subatomic level? How is that any more a true model of gravitation than Newton’s, when it too is just an approximation, albeit a much more accurate one? And does that mean that the spacetime continuum established in his theories are in turn just an approximation of some even more strange phenomenon? On an unrelated note, it seems that Einstein’s wife was also a brilliant physicist, and may have played a nontrivial supporting role in the development of his theories.

But, these points and a reawakened interest in physics aside, there was another interesting aspect to that episode: one of the talking heads was an articulate, black, theoretical physicist. How many black physicists have you seen lately, much less theoretical physicists who moonlight as popular science expositors? I tip my hat to Dr. Sylvester James Gates, Jr. of the University of Maryland, a truly bad-ass black man.