The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene [12]
Witten's remark and those of other experts in the field indicate that it could be decades or even centuries before string theory is fully developed and understood. This may well be true. In fact, the mathematics of string theory is so complicated that, to date, no one even knows the exact equations of the theory. Instead, physicists know only approximations to these equations, and even the approximate equations are so complicated that they as yet have been only partially solved. Nevertheless, an inspiring set of breakthroughs in the latter half of the 1990s—breakthroughs that have answered theoretical questions of hitherto unimaginable difficulty—may well indicate that complete quantitative understanding of string theory is much closer than initially thought. Physicists worldwide are developing powerful new techniques to transcend the numerous approximate methods so far used, collectively piecing together disparate elements of the string theory puzzle at an exhilarating rate.
Surprisingly, these developments are providing new vantage points for reinterpreting some of the basic aspects of the theory that have been in place for some time. For instance, a natural question that may have occurred to you in looking at Figure 1.1 is, Why strings? Why not little frisbee disks? Or microscopic bloblike nuggets? Or a combination of all of these possibilities? As we shall see in Chapter 12, the most recent insights show that these other kinds of ingredients do have an important role in string theory, and have revealed that string theory is actually part of an even grander synthesis currently (and mysteriously) named M-theory. These latest developments will be the subject of the final chapters of this book.
Progress in science proceeds in fits and starts. Some periods are filled with great breakthroughs; at other times researchers experience dry spells. Scientists put forward results, both theoretical and experimental. The results are debated by the community, sometimes they are discarded, sometimes they are modified, and sometimes they provide inspirational jumping-off points for new and more accurate ways of understanding the physical universe. In other words, science proceeds along a zig zag path toward what we hope will be ultimate truth, a path that began with humanity's earliest attempts to fathom the cosmos and whose end we cannot predict. Whether string theory is an incidental rest stop along this path, a landmark turning point, or in fact the final destination we do not know. But the last two decades of research by hundreds of dedicated physicists and mathematicians from numerous countries have given us well-founded hope that we are on the right and possibly final track.
It is a telling testament of the rich and far-reaching nature of string theory that even our present level of understanding has allowed us to gain striking new insights into the workings of the universe. A central thread in what follows will be those developments that carry forward the revolution in our understanding of space and time initiated by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. We will see that if string theory is correct, the fabric of our universe has properties that would likely have dazzled even Einstein.
Part II
The Dilemma of Space, Time, and the Quanta
Chapter 2
Space, Time, and the Eye of the Beholder
In June 1905, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein submitted a technical article to the German Annals of Physics in which he came to grips with a paradox about light that had first troubled him as a teenager, some ten years earlier. Upon turning the final page of Einstein's manuscript, the editor of the journal, Max Planck, realized that the accepted scientific order had been overthrown. Without hoopla or fanfare, a patent clerk from Bern, Switzerland, had completely overturned the traditional notions of space and time and replaced them with a new conception whose properties fly in the face of everything we are familiar with from common experience.
The paradox that had troubled Einstein for