Super Stringtastic

Well I just got back a bit ago from a lecture by Dr. Brian Greene author of "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos". He's one of the most well known Super String Theory proponents, and has a very good PBS special you can watch online here. For his talk he mostly covered some of the basics from his Nova special which includes General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics 101. (I prefer his explanation to the one I learned in a course on those topics as there was much less crazy math, Britney might be able to help you.)

Overall, it was an enjoyable talk and he did a great job. One thing I had forgotten was how small these strings are. The strings are around 10^-35 meters in size, this is a billion billion times smaller than an atom. He gave the following analogy to explain just how small this is:

"Expand an atom to the size of the Universe, a string would be about the size of a tree."

That's really small. He also mentioned in passing that his Nova special had a small error where an Atom the size of New York was compared to string the size of a tree. Apparently, he told Nova they were wrong but they didn't fix it. Not many people get to say Nova was wrong and actually be correct.

After the lecture there was a Q/A period. He did a great job answering all the questions right on the spot, while keeping everything at level one could follow based entirely on the lecture he had just given. One person asked the dumbest question I've ever heard, he wanted to know "If Martians were to look at us with a giant telescope, they would see us moving about randomly like in quantum mechanics. Do you agree this is true?".

Dr. Greene's answer was basically "What???". I really want to know what went through Dr. Greene's mind when faced with this genius question. The worst part was this was the second from last question asked, we missed an opportunity to actually learn something useful rather than someone's dumb theory of quantum people movement.