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g.lemaitre
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String theory may not be proven but has the idea of treating the building blocks of matter as point particle been thoroughly refuted? For example Kaku writes:
Quantum mechanics alone is limited because, like nineteenth-century physics, it is still based on point particles, not super-strings.
In high school we learn that force fields such as gravity and the electric field obey the “inverse square law”—that is, the farther one distances oneself from a particle, the weaker the field becomes. The farther one travels from the sun, for example, the weaker its gravitational pull will be. This means, however, that as one approaches the particle, the force rises dramatically. In fact, at its surface the force field of a point particle must be the inverse of zero squared, which is 1/0. Expressions such as 1/0, however, are infinite and ill-defined. The price we pay for introducing point particles into our theory is that all our calculations of physical quantities, such as energy, are riddled with l/0s. This is enough to render a theory useless; calculations with a theory plagued with infinities cannot be made because the results cannot be trusted.
The problem of infinities would haunt physicists for the next half century. Only with the advent of the superstring theory has this problem been solved, because superstrings banish point particles and replace them with a string.