The Elegant Universe

Einstein's dream was to find a Theory of Everything that unites general relativity (the world of the large, involving the force of gravity) and quantum mechanics (the world of the small, involving the forces of strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and weak nuclear force). Re-tracing the history of string theory, which posits that the smallest particle is a string that vibrates at a specific frequency. String theory predicts six extra dimensions, whose function may be to define the numerical constants in nature.

This episode describes the history and challenges of the creation of string theory. Remarkably, many of the breakthroughs came from mathematics and concepts developed as long as a century earlier.

And now it's time to delve into string theory and the ever stranger implications it has to make about our universe.