The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene [145]
It was here that we felt Batyrev's work could provide us some important clues. Once again, though, the cultural divide between mathematics and physics—in this case, between Morrison and me—started to impede progress. We needed to join the power of the two fields to find the mathematical form of the lower Calabi-Yau shapes that should correspond to the same physical universe as the upper Calabi-Yau shapes, if flop tears are within nature's repertoire. But neither of us was sufficiently conversant in the other's language to see clear to reaching this end. It became obvious to both of us that we needed to bite the bullet: Each of us needed to take a crash course in the other's field of expertise. And so, we decided to spend our days pushing forward as best we could on the calculation, while spending evenings being both professor and student in a class of one: I would lecture to Morrison for an hour or two on the relevant physics; he would then lecture to me for an hour or two on the relevant mathematics. School would typically let out at about 11 P.M.
We stuck to the program, day in and day out. Progress was slow, but we could sense that things were starting to fall into place. Meanwhile, Witten was making significant headway on reformulating the weak link he had earlier identified. His work was establishing a new and more powerful method of translation between the physics of string theory and the mathematics of the Calabi-Yau spaces. Aspinwall, Morrison, and I had almost daily impromptu meetings with Witten at which he would show us new insights following from his approach. As the weeks went by, it gradually became clear that unexpectedly, his work, from a vantage point completely different from our own, was converging on the issue of flop transitions. Aspinwall, Morrison, and I realized that if we didn't complete our calculation soon, Witten would beat us to the punch.
Of Six-Packs and Working Weekends
Nothing focuses the mind of a physicist like a healthy dose of competition. Aspinwall, Morrison, and I went into high gear. It's important to note that this meant one thing to Morrison and me, and quite another to Aspinwall. Aspinwall is a curious mixture of upper-class British sensibility, largely a reflection of the decade he spent at Oxford as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, infused ever so slightly with a prankster's roguishness. As far as work habits go, he is perhaps the most civilized physicist I know. While many of us work deep into the evening, he never works past 5 P.M. While many of us work weekends, Aspinwall does not. He gets away with this because he is both sharp and efficient. Going into high gear for him merely amounts to notching up his efficiency level to even greater heights.
By this time, it was early December. Morrison and I had been lecturing to one another for several months and it was starting to pay off. We were very close to being able to identify the precise shape of the Calabi-Yau space we were seeking. Moreover, Aspinwall had just about finished his computer code, and he now awaited our result, which would be the required input for his program. It was a Thursday night when Morrison and I finally had confidence that we knew how to identify the sought-after Calabi-Yau shape. That, too, boiled down to a procedure that required its own, fairly simple, computer code. By Friday afternoon we had written the program and debugged it; by late Friday night we had our result.
But it was after 5 P.M. and it was Friday. Aspinwall had gone home and would not