The Elegant Universe (42 page)

By the early 1990s, the latter two possibilities made it clear to most string theorists that complete reliance on the perturbative framework was standing squarely in the way of progress. The next breakthrough, most everyone in the field agreed, would require a nonperturbative approach—an approach that was not shackled to approximate calculational techniques and could therefore reach well beyond the limitations of the perturbative framework. As of 1994, finding such a means seemed like a pipe dream. Sometimes, though, pipe dreams spill over into reality.

Duality

Hundreds of string theorists from around the world gather together annually for a conference devoted to recapping the past year’s results and assessing the relative merit of various possible research directions. Depending on the state of progress in a given year, one can usually predict the level of interest and excitement among the participants. In the mid- 1980s, the heyday of the first superstring revolution, the meetings were filled with unrestrained euphoria. Physicists had widespread hope that they would shortly understand string theory completely, and that they would reveal it to be the ultimate theory of the universe. In retrospect this was naive. The intervening years have shown that there are many deep and subtle aspects of string theory that will undoubtedly take prolonged and dedicated effort to understand. The early, unrealistic expectations resulted in a backlash; when everything did not immediately fall into place, many researchers were crestfallen. The string conferences of the late 1980s reflected the low-level disillusionment—physicists presented interesting results, but the atmosphere lacked inspiration. Some even suggested that the community stop holding an annual strings conference. But things picked up in the early 1990s. Through various breakthroughs, some of which we have discussed in previous chapters, string theory was rebuilding its momentum and researchers were regaining their excitement and optimism. But very little presaged what happened at the strings conference in March 1995 at the University of Southern California.

When his appointed hour to speak had arrived, Edward Witten strode to the podium and delivered a lecture that ignited the second superstring revolution. Inspired by earlier works of Duff, Hull, Townsend, and building on insights of Schwarz, the Indian physicist Ashok Sen, and others, Witten announced a strategy for transcending the perturbative understanding of string theory. A central part of the plan involves the concept of duality.

Physicists use the term duality to describe theoretical models that appear to be different but nevertheless can be shown to describe exactly the same physics. There are “trivial” examples of dualities in which ostensibly different theories are actually identical and appear to be different only because of the way in which they happen to be presented. To someone who knows only English, general relativity might not immediately be recognized as Einstein’s theory if presented in Chinese. A physicist fluent in both languages, though, can easily perform a translation from one to the other, establishing their equivalence. We call this example “trivial” because nothing is gained, from the point of view of physics, by such a translation. If someone who is fluent in English and Chinese were studying a difficult problem in general relativity, it would be equally challenging regardless of the language used to expressed it. A switch from English to Chinese, or vice versa, brings no new physical insight.

Nontrivial examples of duality are those in which distinct descriptions of the same physical situation do yield different and complementary physical insights and mathematical methods of analysis. In fact, we have already encountered two examples of duality. In Chapter 10, we discussed how string theory in a universe that has a circular dimension of radius R can equally well be described as a universe with a circular dimension of radius 1/R. These are distinct geometrical situations that, through the properties of string theory, are actually physically identical. Mirror symmetry is a second example. Here two different Calabi-Yau shapes of the extra six spatial dimensions—universes that at first sight would appear to be completely distinct—yield exactly the same physical properties. They give dual descriptions of a single universe. Of crucial importance, unlike the case of English versus Chinese, there are important physical insights that follow from using these dual descriptions, such as a minimum size for circular dimensions and topology-changing processes in string theory.

In his lecture at Strings ‘95, Witten gave evidence for a new, profound kind of duality. As briefly outlined at the beginning of this chapter, he suggested that the five string theories, although apparently different in their basic construction, are all just different ways of describing the same underlying physics. Rather than having five different string theories, then, we would simply have five different windows onto this single underlying theoretical framework.

Before the developments of the mid-1990s, the possibility of such a grand version of duality was one of those wishful ideas that physicists might harbor, but about which they would rarely if ever speak, since it seems so outlandish. If two string theories differ with regard to significant details of their construction, it’s hard to imagine how they could merely be different descriptions of the same underlying physics. Nonetheless, through the subtle power of string theory, there is mounting evidence that all five string theories are dual. And furthermore, as we will discuss, Witten gave evidence that even a sixth theory gets mixed into the stew.

These developments are intimately entwined with the issues regarding the applicability of perturbative methods we encountered at the end of the preceding section. The reason is that the five string theories are manifestly different when each is weakly coupled—a term of the trade meaning that the coupling constant of a theory is less than 1. Because of their reliance on perturbative methods, physicists have been unable for some time to address the question of what properties any one of the string theories would have if its coupling constant should be larger than 1—the so-called strongly coupled behavior. The claim of Witten and others, as we now discuss, is that this crucial question can now be answered. Their results convincingly suggest that, together with a sixth theory we have yet to describe, the strong coupling behavior of any of these theories has a dual description in terms of the weak coupling behavior of another, and vice versa.

To gain a more tangible sense of what this means, you might want to keep the following analogy in mind. Imagine two rather sheltered individuals. One loves ice but, strangely enough, has never seen water (in its liquid form). The other loves water but, equally strangely, has never seen ice. Through a chance meeting, they decide to team up for a camping trip in the desert. When they set out to leave, each is fascinated by the other’s gear. The ice-lover is captivated by the water-lover’s silky smooth transparent liquid, and the water-lover is strangely drawn to the remarkable solid crystal cubes brought by the ice-lover. Neither has any inkling that there is actually a deep relationship between water and ice; to them, they are two completely different substances. But as they head out into the scorching heat of the desert, they are shocked to find that the ice slowly begins to turn into water. And, in the frigid cold of the desert night, they are equally shocked to find that the liquid water slowly begins to turn into solid ice. They realize that these two substances—which they initially thought to be completely unrelated—are intimately connected.

The duality among the five string theories is somewhat similar: Roughly speaking, the string coupling constants play a role analogous to temperature in our desert analogy. Like ice and water, any two of the five string theories, at first sight, appear to be completely distinct. But as we vary their respective coupling constants, the theories transmute among themselves. Just as ice transmutes into water as we raise its temperature, one string theory can transmute into another as we increase the value of its coupling constant. This takes us a long way toward showing that all of the string theories are dual descriptions of one single underlying structure—the analog of H2O for water and ice.

The reasoning underlying these results relies almost entirely on the use of arguments rooted in principles of symmetry Let’s discuss this.

The Power of Symmetry

Over the years, no one even attempted to study the properties of any of the five string theories for large values of their string coupling constants because no one had any idea how to proceed without the perturbative framework. However, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, physicists made slow but steady progress in identifying certain special properties—including certain masses and force charges—that are part of the strong-coupling physics of a given string theory, and yet are still within our ability to calculate. The calculation of these properties, which necessarily transcends the perturbative framework, has played a central role in driving the progress of the second superstring revolution and is firmly rooted in the power of symmetry.

Symmetry principles provide insightful tools for understanding a great many things about the physical world. We have discussed, for instance, that the well-supported belief that the laws of physics do not treat any place in the universe or moment in time as special allows us to argue that the laws governing the here and now are the same ones at work everywhere and everywhen. This is a grandiose example, but symmetry principles can be equally important in less all-encompassing circumstances, For instance, if you witness a crime but were able to catch only a glimpse of the right side of the perpetrator’s face, a police artist can nonetheless use your information to sketch the whole face. Symmetry is why. Although there are differences between the left and right sides of a person’s face, most are symmetric enough that an image of one side can be flipped over to get a good approximation of the other.

In each of these widely different applications, the power of symmetry is its ability to nail down properties in an indirect manner—something that is often far easier than a more direct approach. We could learn about fundamental physics in the Andromeda galaxy by going there, finding a planet around some star, building accelerators, and performing the kinds of experiments carried out on earth. But the indirect approach of invoking symmetry under changes of locale is far easier. We could also learn about features on the left side of the perpetrator’s face by tracking him down and examining it. But it is often far easier to invoke the left-right symmetry of faces.7

Supersymmetry is a more abstract symmetry principle that relates physical properties of elementary constituents that carry different amounts of spin. At best there are only hints from experimental results that the microworld incorporates this symmetry, but, for reasons discussed earlier, there is a strong belief that it does. It is certainly an integral part of string theory. In the 1990s, led by the pioneering work of Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study, physicists have realized that supersymmetry provides a sharp and incisive tool that can answer some very difficult and important questions by indirect means.

Even without understanding intricate details of a theory, the fact that it has supersymmetry built in allows us to place significant constraints on the properties it can have. Using a linguistic analogy, imagine that we are told that a sequence of letters has been written on a slip of paper, that the sequence has exactly three occurrences, say, of the letter “y,” and that the paper has been hidden within a sealed envelope. If we are given no further information, then there is no way that we can guess the sequence—for all we know it might be a random assortment of letters with three y’s like mvcfojziyxidqfqzyycdi or any one of the infinitely many other possibilities. But imagine that we are subsequently given two further clues: The hidden sequence of letters spells out an English word and it has the minimum number of letters consistent with the first clue of having three y’s. From the infinite number of letter sequences at the outset, these clues reduce the possibilities to one word—to the shortest English word containing three y’s: syzygy.

Supersymmetry supplies similar constraining clues for those theories that incorporate its symmetry principles. To get a feel for this, imagine that we are presented with a physics puzzle analogous to the linguistic puzzle just described. Hidden inside a box there is something—its identity is left unspecified—that has a certain force charge. The charge might be electric, magnetic, or any of the other generalizations, but to be concrete let’s say it has three units of electric charge. Without further information, the identity of the contents cannot be determined. It might be three particles of charge 1, like positrons or protons; it might be four particles of charge 1 and one particle of charge -1 (like the electron), as this combination still has a net charge of three; it might be nine particles of charge one-third (like the up-quark) or it might be the same nine particles accompanied by any number of chargeless particles (such as photons). As was the case with the hidden sequence of letters when we only had the clue about the three y’s, the possibilities for the contents of the box are endless.

But let’s now imagine that, as in the case of the linguistic puzzle, we are given two further clues: The theory describing the world—and hence the contents of the box—is supersymmetric, and the content of the box has the minimum mass consistent with the first clue of having three units of charge. Based on the insights of E. Bogomoln’yi, Manoj Prasad, and Charles Sommerfeld, physicists have shown that this specification of a tight organizational framework (the framework of supersymmetry, the analog of the English language) and a “minimality constraint” (minimum mass for a chosen amount of electric charge, the analog of a minimum word length for a chosen number of y’s) implies that the identity of the hidden contents is nailed down uniquely. That is, merely by ensuring that the contents of the box is the lightest it could possibly be and still have the specified charge, physicists showed that its identity is fully established. Constituents of minimum mass for a chosen value of charge are known as BPS states, in honor of their three discoverers.8