The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (43 page)

As the work of Newton and Einstein exemplifies, scientific breakthroughs are sometimes born of a single scientist's staggering genius, pure and simple. But that's rare. Much more frequently, great breakthroughs represent the collective effort of many scientists, each building on the insights of others to accomplish what no individual could have achieved in isolation. One scientist might contribute an idea that sets a colleague thinking, which leads to an observation that reveals an unexpected relationship that inspires an important advance, which starts anew the cycle of discovery. Broad knowledge, technical facility, flexibility of thought, openness to unanticipated connections, immersion in the free flow of ideas worldwide, hard work, and significant luck are all critical parts of scientific discovery. In recent times, there is perhaps no major breakthrough that better exemplifies this than the development of
superstring theory.

Superstring theory is an approach that many scientists believe successfully merges general relativity and quantum mechanics. And as we will see, there is reason to hope for even more. Although it is still very much a work in progress, superstring theory may well be a fully unified theory of all forces and all matter, a theory that reaches Einstein's dream and beyond—a theory, I and many others believe, that is blazing the beginnings of a trail which will one day lead us to the deepest laws of the universe. Truthfully, though, superstring theory was not conceived as an ingenious means to reach these noble and long-standing goals. Instead, the history of superstring theory is full of accidental discoveries, false starts, missed opportunities, and nearly ruined careers. It is also, in a precise sense, the story of the discovery of the right solution for the wrong problem.

In 1968, Gabriele Veneziano, a young postdoctoral research fellow working at CERN, was one of many physicists trying to understand the strong nuclear force by studying the results of high-energy particle collisions produced in atom smashers around the world. After months of analyzing patterns and regularities in the data, Veneziano recognized a surprising and unexpected connection to an esoteric area of mathematics. He realized that a two-hundred-year-old formula discovered by the famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (the
Euler beta function
) seemed to match data on the strong nuclear force with precision. While this might not sound particularly unusual—theoretical physicists deal with arcane formulae all the time—it was a striking case of the cart's rolling miles ahead of the horse. More often than not, physicists first develop an intuition, a mental picture, a broad understanding of the physical principles underlying whatever they are studying and only then seek the equations necessary to ground their intuition in rigorous mathematics. Veneziano, to the contrary, jumped right to the equation; his brilliance was to recognize unusual patterns in the data and to make the unanticipated link to a formula devised centuries earlier for purely mathematical interest.

But although Veneziano had the formula in hand, he had no explanation for
why
it worked. He lacked a physical picture of why Euler's beta function should be relevant to particles influencing each other through the strong nuclear force. Within two years the situation completely changed. In 1970, papers by Leonard Susskind of Stanford, Holger Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute, and Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago revealed the physical underpinnings of Veneziano's discovery. These physicists showed that if the strong force between two particles were due to a tiny, extremely thin, almost rubber-band-like strand that connected the particles, then the quantum processes that Veneziano and others had been poring over would be mathematically described using Euler's formula. The little elastic strands were christened
strings
and now, with the horse properly before the cart, string theory was officially born.

But hold the bubbly. To those involved in this research, it was gratifying to understand the physical origin of Veneziano's insight, since it suggested that physicists were on their way to unmasking the strong nuclear force. Yet the discovery was not greeted with universal enthusiasm; far from it. Very far. In fact, Susskind's paper was returned by the journal to which he submitted it with the comment that the work was of minimal interest, an evaluation Susskind recalls well: "I was stunned, I was knocked off my chair, I was depressed, so I went home and got drunk."
⁹
Eventually, his paper and the others that announced the string concept were all published, but it was not long before the theory suffered two more devastating setbacks. Close scrutiny of more refined data on the strong nuclear force, collected during the early 1970s, showed that the string approach failed to describe the newer results accurately. Moreover, a new proposal called
quantum chromodynamics,
which was firmly rooted in the traditional ingredients of particles and fields—no strings at all
—was
able to describe all the data convincingly. And so by 1974, string theory had been dealt a one-two knockout punch. Or so it seemed.

John Schwarz was one of the earliest string enthusiasts. He once told me that from the start, he had a gut feeling that the theory was deep and important. Schwarz spent a number of years analyzing its various mathematical aspects; among other things, this led to the discovery of
super
string theory—as we shall see, an important refinement of the original string proposal. But with the rise of quantum chromodynamics and the failure of the string framework to describe the strong force, the justification for continuing to work on string theory began to run thin. Nevertheless, there was one particular mismatch between string theory and the strong nuclear force that kept nagging at Schwarz, and he found that he just couldn't let it go. The quantum mechanical equations of string theory predicted that a particular, rather unusual, particle should be copiously produced in the high-energy collisions taking place in atom smashers. The particle would have zero mass, like a photon, but string theory predicted it would have
spin-two,
meaning, roughly speaking, that it would spin twice as fast as a photon. None of the experiments had ever found such a particle, so this appeared to be among the erroneous predictions made by string theory.

Schwarz and his collaborator Joël Scherk puzzled over this case of a missing particle, until in a magnificent leap they made a connection to a completely different problem. Although no one had been able to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics, physicists had determined certain features that would emerge from any successful union. And, as indicated in Chapter 9, one feature they found was that just as the electromagnetic force is transmitted microscopically by photons, the gravitational force should be microscopically transmitted by another class of particles, gravitons (the most elementary, quantum bundles of gravity). Although gravitons have yet to be detected experimentally, the theoretical analyses all agreed that gravitons must have two properties: they must be massless and have spin-two. For Schwarz and Scherk this rang a loud bell—these were just the properties of the rogue particle predicted by string theory—and inspired them to make a bold move, one that would transform a failing of string theory into a striking success.

They proposed that string theory shouldn't be thought of as a quantum mechanical theory of the strong nuclear force. They argued that even though the theory had been discovered in an attempt to understand the strong force, it was actually the solution to a different problem. It was actually the first ever quantum mechanical theory of the
gravitational
force. They claimed that the massless spin-two particle predicted by string theory was the graviton, and that the equations of string theory necessarily embodied a quantum mechanical description of gravity.

Schwarz and Scherk published their proposal in 1974 and expected a major reaction from the physics community. Instead, their work was ignored. In retrospect, it's not hard to understand why. It seemed to some that the string concept had become a theory in search of an application. After the attempt to use string theory to explain the strong nuclear force had failed, it seemed as though its proponents wouldn't accept defeat and, instead, were flat out determined to find relevance for the theory elsewhere. Fuel was added to this view's fire when it became clear that Schwarz and Scherk needed to change the size of strings in their theory radically so that the force transmitted by the candidate gravitons would have the familiar, known strength of gravity. Since gravity is an extremely weak force
³²
and since, it turns out, the longer the string the
stronger
the force transmitted, Schwarz and Scherk found that strings needed to be extremely tiny to transmit a force with gravity's feeble strength; they needed to be about the Planck length in size, a hundred billion billion times smaller than previously envisioned. So small, doubters wryly noted, that there was no equipment that would be able to see them, which meant that the theory could not be tested experimentally.
¹⁰

By contrast, the 1970s witnessed one success after another for the more conventional, non-string-based theories, formulated with point particles and fields. Theorists and experimenters alike had their heads and hands full of concrete ideas to investigate and predictions to test. Why turn to speculative string theory when there was so much exciting work to be done within a tried-and-true framework? In much the same vein, although physicists knew in the backs of their minds that the problem of merging gravity and quantum mechanics remained unsolved using conventional methods, it was not a problem that commanded attention. Almost everyone acknowledged that it was an important issue and would need to be addressed one day, but with the wealth of work still to be done on the nongravitational forces, the problem of quantizing gravity was pushed to a barely burning back burner. And, finally, in the mid to late 1970s, string theory was far from having been completely worked out. Containing a candidate for the graviton was a success, but many conceptual and technical issues had yet to be addressed. It seemed thoroughly plausible that the theory would be unable to surmount one or more of these issues, so working on string theory meant taking a considerable risk. Within a few years, the theory might be dead.

Schwarz remained resolute. He believed that the discovery of string theory, the first plausible approach for describing gravity in the language of quantum mechanics, was a major breakthrough. If no one wanted to listen, fine. He would press on and develop the theory, so that when people were ready to pay attention, string theory would be that much further along. His determination proved prescient.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Schwarz teamed up with Michael Green, then of Queen Mary College in London, and set to work on some of the technical hurdles facing string theory. Primary among these was the problem of
anomalies.
The details are not of the essence, but, roughly speaking, an anomaly is a pernicious quantum effect that spells doom for a theory by implying that it violates certain sacred principles, such as energy conservation. To be viable, a theory must be free of all anomalies. Initial investigations had revealed that string theory was plagued by anomalies, which was one of the main technical reasons it had failed to generate much enthusiasm. The anomalies signified that although string theory appeared to provide a quantum theory of gravity, since it contained gravitons, on closer inspection the theory suffered from its own subtle mathematical inconsistencies.

Schwarz realized, however, that the situation was not clear-cut. There was a chance—it was a long shot—that a complete calculation would reveal that the various quantum contributions to the anomalies afflicting string theory, when combined correctly, cancelled each other out. Together with Green, Schwarz undertook the arduous task of calculating these anomalies, and by the summer of 1984 the two hit pay dirt. One stormy night, while working late at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado, they completed one of the field's most important calculations—a calculation proving that all of the potential anomalies, in a way that seemed almost miraculous,
did
cancel each other out. String theory, they revealed, was free of anomalies and hence suffered from no mathematical inconsistencies. String theory, they demonstrated convincingly, was quantum mechanically viable.

This time physicists listened. It was the mid-1980s, and the climate in physics had shifted considerably. Many of the essential features of the three nongravitational forces had been worked out theoretically and confirmed experimentally. Although important details remained unresolved—and some still do—the community was ready to tackle the next major problem: the merging of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Then, out of a little-known corner of physics, Green and Schwarz burst on the scene with a definite, mathematically consistent, and aesthetically pleasing proposal for how to proceed. Almost overnight, the number of researchers working on string theory leaped from two to over a thousand. The first string revolution was under way.

I began graduate school at Oxford University in the fall of 1984, and within a few months the corridors were abuzz with talk of a revolution in physics. As the Internet was yet to be widely used, rumor was a dominant channel for the rapid spread of information, and every day brought word of new breakthroughs. Researchers far and wide commented that the atmosphere was charged in a way unseen since the early days of quantum mechanics, and there was serious talk that the end of theoretical physics was within reach.

String theory was new to almost everyone, so in those early days its details were not common knowledge. We were particularly fortunate at Oxford: Michael Green had recently visited to lecture on string theory, so many of us became familiar with the theory's basic ideas and essential claims. And impressive claims they were. In a nutshell, here is what the theory said:

Take any piece of matter—a block of ice, a chunk of rock, a slab of iron—and imagine cutting it in half, then cutting one of the pieces in half again, and on and on; imagine continually cutting the material into ever smaller pieces. Some 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks had posed the problem of determining the finest, uncuttable, indivisible ingredient that would be the end product of such a procedure. In our age we have learned that sooner or later you come to atoms, but atoms are not the answer to the Greeks' question, because they can be cut into finer constituents. Atoms can be split. We have learned that they consist of electrons that swarm around a central nucleus that is composed of yet finer particles—protons and neutrons. And in the late 1960s, experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator revealed that even neutrons and protons themselves are made up of more fundamental constituents: each proton and each neutron consists of three particles known as quarks, as mentioned in Chapter 9 and illustrated in Figure 12.3a.

Conventional theory, supported by state-of-the-art experiments, envisions electrons and quarks as dots with no spatial extent whatsoever; in this view, therefore, they mark the end of the line—the last of nature's matryoshka dolls to be found in the microscopic makeup of matter.

Figure 12.3
(
a
)
Conventional theory is based on electrons and quarks as the basic constituents of matter.
(
b
)
String theory suggests that each particle is actually a vibrating string.

Here is where string theory makes its appearance. String theory challenges the conventional picture by proposing that electrons and quarks are
not
zero-sized particles. Instead, the conventional particle-as-dot model, according to string theory, is an approximation of a more refined portrayal in which each particle is actually a tiny, vibrating filament of energy, called a
string,
as you can see in Figure 12.3b. These strands of vibrating energy are envisioned to have no thickness, only length, and so strings are one-dimensional entities. Yet, because the strings are so small, some hundred billion billion times smaller than a single atomic nucleus (10
^-33
centimeters), they appear to be points even when examined with our most advanced atom smashers.

Because our understanding of string theory is far from complete, no one knows for sure whether the story ends here—whether, assuming the theory is correct, strings are truly the final Russian doll, or whether strings themselves might be composed of yet finer ingredients. We will come back to this issue, but for now we follow the historical development of the subject and imagine that strings are truly where the buck stops; we imagine that strings are
the
most elementary ingredient in the universe.