Introduction
We live in exciting times. The frontiers of physics have been pushed
to unprecedented horizons. The Holy Grail of fundamental physics
research today is to find and describe a theory that explains, at
least in principle, all physical phenomena, which in turns explains
chemistry, biology and other material sciences. This, however, is
not without controversy. Currently, the most popular candidate for
such a theory is known as string or superstring theory. It suffers
from the problem of being a purely mathematical science with no
experimental backing, and belief in it has been criticized as bordering
on “faith” as opposed to scientific scrutiny. On the
other hand the recent switching-on of our most advanced experimental
tool, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, gives new hope in
our search for clues as to what the universe is made of on a fundamental
level. What happened exactly on, or even before, the Big Bang? Where
are we coming from and where are we going? Questions that have never
been addressed before by physicists. The game is afoot and the search
is on. This book contains articles by leading physicists describing
the current situation. Among them are proponents as well as opponents
of string theory, and proponents of other ideas such as Loop quantum
gravity, commutative geometry, and others.
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