В» At the end of June, on YouTube, Papacito displays all his disappointment. The universe is simpler than we thought.вЂњDemocracy works on the presumed stupidity of the masses, by definition a manipulable beast. MICHO KAKU: I think the one thing that people should realise is that physics, at the fundamental level, gets simpler and simpler the deeper we go, but becomes more powerful, the deeper we go. NARRATOR: If Dr Kaku is right, the huge complexity of the entire universe could be reduced to the simple and elegant vibration of strings. If you could magnify all the particles you see around us, we would see a lot of rubber bands, a lot of rubber bands vibrating at different frequencies.

It is invisible and it holds the galaxies together, but how do we prove it? We think that dark matter could be the next octave of the string. MICHIO KAKU: Dark matter makes up most of the matter of the universe. Dr Kaku believes string theory could even explain the mystery that is dark matter. Its proponents though, consider it to be the best hope of unifying physics. Its critics point out that many of its predictions are untestable something Dr Kaku himself acknowledges. Of course, string theory is just that - a theory. NARRATOR: So, string theory offers a tantalising possibility an explanation for the vast variety we see in the universe, from the collisions of stars to the collisions of atoms. We vibrate it another way, it's called a quark. We vibrate it another way, it's called a neutrino. MICHIO KAKU: It vibrates one way, we call it an electron. And just like the strings on a musical instrument, if you put some energy into them, they vibrate. Or to put it another way - the strings in string theory. NARRATOR: Of course, Dr Kaku doesnвЂ™t mean an actual rubber band. If I had a super microscope and I could peer into an electron, what would I see? I would see a rubber band, a vibrating rubber band. So what does string theory predict we would see? MICHIO KAKU: We now believe that all these subatomic particles, hundreds of subatomic particles that we get by smashing protons at the Large Hadron Collider, they're nothing but musical notes as Pythagoras believed. These experiments are our best way of testing theories about how the universe works. NARRATOR: So how do we go from PythagorasвЂ™ musical musings to proper physics? The first port of call would be a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, where tiny particles are smashed to pieces in high energy collisions and then closely studied. And only recently have we come up with a new idea based on the Pythagorean idea of music. And then he said, aha, the mathematics of music is rich enough to explain the diversity of everything we see around us. You pluck a lyra string and you get a note, you pluck another one, you get another note. And he looked around and saw a lyra string. The great Greek mathematician said that there must be a unifying principle, a paradigm by which to summarise the vast creation that we see all around us of the universe that we know. Conversely, quantum theory is great with atoms but predicts the whole universe should collapse into a black hole, which it clearly doesn't because weвЂ™re all still here! So, will we ever find a single theory that explains everything? MICHIO KAKU: Two thousand years ago, Pythagoras asked himself that question.

And sometimes even give conflicting results Albert EinsteinвЂ™s general theory of relativity works perfectly well for predictions about the movements of stars and galaxies, but doesnвЂ™t work when applied to the behaviour of subatomic particles.

NARRATOR: When Dr Kaku talks about our present-day understanding, he means our current best theories about the way the universe works. MICHIO KAKU: What happened before the Big Bang? Are there other universes? What lies on the other side of creation? The other side of a black hole? Are gateways possible? Wormholes? Higher dimensions? Do we live in a multiverse? All these questions cannot be answered using our present-day understanding.

CAPTION: STRING THEORY A REALLY SIMPLE WAY TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE NARRATOR: Dr Michio Kaku has spent decades grappling with - and attempting to answer some of lifeвЂ™s biggest questions. MICHIO KAKU: Theoretical Physicist and Author: String theory is finite. But there is one particularly enticing idea that some theoretical physicists think might just be вЂitвЂ™, String Theory. Many theories have been tested and so far, every one of them has failed to fully explain what we see in our universe. Scientists have long searched for a simple theory that explains how the universe works, a theory of everything. NARRATOR: For as long as humans have looked at the stars, we have wondered how they got there and what lies beyond them. String theory - a simple way to understand the universe

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