The Answer to Everything is 496...

I'm struggling not to catch the same thing that Danelle just got over. Soreness, cough, fever, extreme tiredness.. so as a North American... my pre-eminent North American strategy is a pre-emptive attack on the virus of mass destruction by just been sitting in bed, resting, and thinking healthy thoughts...
.. overall though I'm hooked on watching a show called 'The Elegant Universe' that tries to describe String Theory to the extremely... extremely... lay-person. As far as I can tell the story goes something like this:

1) Scientists have an idea how the universe works on the extremely large scale using the theory of gravity called 'General Relativity'.

2) And scientists have an idea of how the universe works on an extremely small scale (smaller than the atom) using the theories of electromagnetism, and small and weak nuclear forces, all under the heading of 'Quantum Mechanics'.

3) The problem is that these two sets of laws conflict and have yet to be joined together into one unified theory. A theory for everything. This theory is kind of important because it could explain, for example, black holes... and more importantly the Big Bang or worm holes. (How this theory actually jumps off the page and becomes more than merely being a bunch of numbers and letters on a page is still a mystery to me)

So the new idea is that there are things even smaller than the smallest particles that we see that is simply strands, or 'strings', of pure energy that vibrate at different frequencies... Finally solved with string theory... without anomalies... when both sides of the equation equalled 496...?... and just as a violin string vibrating at different frequencies produces different notes, so these energy strings vibrating at different frequencies produce all of the different particles in the universe.

And the unification of the two theories only came at the cost of 7 new dimensions, weightless particles, and parallel universes...

But the weirdest thing that I have to add on to this is from a writer JRR Tolkein. He was involved in a group that studied and wrote about ancient myths that could be found from around the world. The interesting part is that when it came time for him to reinterpret these old myths in his own book, he described the creation of the universe and everything in it as a song... that each part and each vibration made up and described the matter and form that the universe took... I'm sure he had nothing at all to do with string theory... but to even think about the universe along the same line of thought of vibrations, and getting that idea from reading ancient myths, is weird...