String Theory and Gravity: How To Find Einstein in the Violin Section
If you ask a person on the street what they know about string theory, probably the most common answer (after "absolutely nothing") will be that it's untestable, maybe even unscientific. There hasn't been a single real world prediction produced from that esoteric, hopelessly complicated theory. But on the contrary, if you were feeling cheeky you might say that string theory has made one prediction that is put to the test every single day: what goes up must come down. It predicts the existence of gravity. In fact, it might be the only theory in which the equations of gravity naturally fall into our laps. Moreover, it is one of the only candidates for a theory of quantum gravity - a theory that could explain how gravity operates on subatomic scales. For decades during the 20 th Century, some of the smartest people on the planet tried to force gravity to work at these tiny scales, but it refused to play ball. And then along came string theory, in which gravity didn'