The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

The second major theme, the human need to understand, deeply relates to the first theme. Specifically, while the drive to find a unifying theory of physics is limited to physicists only, it is inspired by humans’ need to understand and explain their surroundings and experiences. According to Greene, this is a common drive throughout all humanity and may even encompass the “whole human struggle” (387). Throughout the book, Greene implies that this deep need for understanding may be the most basic quality of human nature, shared by all people in all times and places. In the Preface, Greene describes his experiences as a professor and lecturer, witnessing in his audiences and students “a widespread yearning to understand” (x). Moreover, this yearning drives each scientist and mathematician he mentions in the book.

The yearning to understand is best represented by the question “why?” This question echoes throughout The Elegant Universe. In Part 1, Greene repeatedly asks why: why so many different particles, why three families, why these patterns, why the masses of each are seemingly so random. As he states, “[T]he universe is the way it is because the matter and force particles have the properties they do. But is there a scientific explanation for why they have those properties?” (13). The question of “why” is not restricted only to Greene’s pondering. Many important developments of physics that Greene examines began with a problem and a scientist asking “why” or the related question “what if.” For instance, Einstein’s discovery of the special theory of relativity began with the question of what would happen if an observer chased a light beam at light speed. Before that, Newton devised his theory of universal gravitation by asking why objects fall and planets orbit around the sun. Likewise, Planck’s concept of “lumpy energy,” which resulted in quantum mechanics, was inspired by asking why the accepted theories of thermodynamics could not answer simple questions about energy output. Similarly, Greene and his colleagues contributed major developments to string theory by asking what would happen if a Calabi-Yau shape were to tear. At its base, every scientific discovery starts with asking why things behave the way they do. Everything else expands from there.

However, Greene is clear that this is not merely a characteristic of scientists. It is a deeply human drive, regardless of whether one studies the sciences. It begins when toddlers ask “why” again and again. Even children need to know. Einstein once described his search for knowledge as “‘the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and final emergence into the light’” (387). Hawking once noted that the search for understanding is “a first step toward knowing ‘the mind of God’” (117). The Elegant Universe implies that the question “why” is the rallying cry for all human knowledge, from the physical sciences to philosophy to theology.