Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

80 CHAPTER 17. PHYSICS TODAY: STRING THEORY
• Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? (Phil
Anderson)
• Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in
different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string
that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary
particles.(Lee Smolin)
Figure 17.2: Planck telling Bohr that classical physics should not be abandoned.
On the blackboard you see Maxwell’s equations, the fundamental
mathematical model describing virtually all of (classical) electro-magnetics.