A Capella Science – Bohemian Gravity!

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…

Hey Donald, Got Some More Targets for You ..

Queen Elizabeth: “I kind of remember her when she was younger and thinking, ‘Not bad.’ Not great, mind you, but, eh, you could do worse. But now she’s like 100, with crazy eyes, and she is still flying all over the place and keeping this very lovely Kate Middleton—and I mean this is a lovely, lovely woman, am I right?—from being elected queen. Liz needs to wrap it up, OK? It’s enough already. Her mind is shot. She’s little respected. Just go some place with that geezer and close it down. You know what I’m saying, right? Make the monarchy hot again. Resign!”

Homeless Shelters: “My limo took a wrong turn to get out of Fifth Avenue traffic the other day, and we passed this real ugly, small, sad building on prime real estate. I mean it was grimy, with a bunch of disheveled people out front with blank looks on their faces. So I ask my chauffeur, ‘Hey, whatever your name is, what’s this pathetic waste of space we’re looking at?’ He told me it was a homeless shelter. Wow! I was amazed. I mean, why do we need those in New York? This is the greatest city in the world. You give me that space—and I’ll have 25-story gleaming towers in place there in two seconds—it will be the most beautiful, amazing building you’ve ever seen. It’s not brain surgery, folks. Enough!”

First there was the driverless car, now there is a riderless bike

The driverless car is widely heralded as the transportation method of the future but many critics say there are more efficient and greener ways to navigate through our world.

Enter the riderless bike. The small Vancouver, B.C., startup RDRLESS, is banking on the idea that people will want bicycles that ride themselves in the near future.

Shelia McKenzie uses the RDRLESS app to send her bike off to work. (Joseph Schweers/Derek Pante)

“Although Google is also working on an autonomous bike, ours is more disruptive because it doesn’t require a rider at all,