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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What materials were formed during the period of the big bang known as the "primordial nucleosynthesis"?

2. Under string theory, which of the following is true regarding extra dimensions?

3. Which of the following is true regarding the amount of visible matter in the universe compared to the amount of matter required to cause collapse of the universe?

4. Which one of the following do physicists believe occurs at the central point of a black hole?

5. What is entropy a measure of?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is a wormhole, and how is it formed?

2. Describe the entire process of a conifold transition.

3. Describe the state of the universe's expansion, including what its ultimate fate might be.

4. What did Morrison and Greene discover together, and why is it important?

5. Describe the big bang according to string theory.

6. How does a black hole's entropy change?

7. What is the Calabi-Yau space?

8. Greene suggests that black holes are very similar to, and might in fact be, elementary particles. What evidence supports this suggestion?

9. Describe Kaluza-Klein theory.

10. Why are superparticles important to string theory, and how has research into these particles affected the field of string theory?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Accelerated Evidence

In this book, the author presents many thought problems to help the reader work through difficult concepts. The unintuitive concepts of special and general relativity receive particular attention. These theories fly in the face of observations made in everyday life, but at the speeds and scales that they deal with, they have been confirmed to be exactly correct. Furthermore, they form one of the cornerstones of modern physics. This essay deals with thought problems that illustrate the underlying principles of special and general relativity. The essay should include ample explanations and transitions so that it is cohesive and makes sense.

Part 1) Describe a number of novel thought problems that would demonstrate the principles of special relativity, that motion is relative, and that time and space warp for an object moving near the speed of light. Each thought problem should be robust enough that it requires multiple sentences to explain. Each problem should clearly demonstrate the principle in question, and explained fully, with a succinct conclusion.

Part 2) Imagine that a space traveler is locked inside a ship, and cannot use any senses or tools to observe anything outside of the room he is occupying. Propose a number of experiments that the traveler could perform to determine what the motion of the spacecraft is. Be sure to include a discussion of constant-velocity motion, accelerated motion, gravitational acceleration, and orbital (circular) motion.

Part 3) Repeat the analysis performed in part 1 for the case of general relativity. Demonstrate the equivalence between acceleration and gravity, the warping of space-time caused by massive objects, and the straight-line motion of objects through curved space.

Essay Topic 2

The Conflict of the Century

Between quantum mechanics and general relativity, almost any phenomenon in the universe can be explained and understood, but for physicists, this is not enough. It has long been known that these theories conflict with one another, and that therefore, neither of them can be exactly correct. The search for a single unifying theory that can reconcile these two branches of science is ongoing. String theory is just one of the many solutions that has been suggested, but it has lasted the longest and sustained the most scrutiny.

Part 1) Describe the conflicts between quantum mechanics and general relativity. How and where do these theories become mutually incomprehensible? Provide as many examples of these conflicts as possible.

Part 2) Research and describe some of the efforts to unify these fields, apart from string theory. How are these problems approached, and how successful have these theories been?

Part 3) Describe string theory's approach to resolving these conflicts. How does this approach differ from the others discussed above, and how successful has string theory been compared with these others?

Essay Topic 3

Inflation

Inflation theory is a very unusual theory about the first moments of the universe's existence. It predicts that an unimaginably massive expansion took place in a mind-bogglingly short period. However, the theory has been more or less definitively confirmed, and is an important part of modern cosmology.

Part 1) Describe the nature of the microwave cosmic background radiation and the horizon problem. Fully explain how these things relate to the expansion of the universe and the classic model of the big bang.

Part 2) Explain the development of inflation theory. How does it solve the horizon problem?

Part 3) How is the inflation theory affected by string theory?

Part 4) Explain some of the effects of the inflationary period on the universe that we observe today.

(see the answer keys)

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