(A reading of 'The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory' by Brian Greene)
In describing the evolution of superstring theory, The Elegant Universe seeks to impart an echo of way this mathematical muezzin calls theoretical physicists to prayer. String Theory preaches a universe whose fundamental constituents have length, unlike the point particle of Old Physics. What we think of as vanishingly small particles are, in String Theory, demonically vibrating loops on a scale of 10-33cm (the Planck length), each of whose sigil of vibration determines its observable charge and mass.
Now the current 'Standard Model' of point particles and forces is saggier than Bagpuss(1), being pinned together by 19 arbitrarily chosen parameters. Strike one for strings, whose oscillations predict the mass & charge values from first principles. The Standard Model is also flakey; it's shakier to a minor tweak in values than the 1929 Stock Exchange. Supersymmetry adds a fermion (spin 1/2) partner for every boson (integer spin) particle, and by this submicron matchmaking makes the model stable. And lo! We have supersymmetric string theory (a.k.a. superstring theory) which in addition predicts the unification of strong and electroweak forces at high energies and (sound of heavenly choirs) includes Gravity! Such archangelic delights lead physicists to sing of superstring theory as a T.O.E. (Theory of Everything).
Brought forth to a public flecked by the postmodern the text makes a token effort to address the validity of scientific claims to Absolute Truth, but only so as to kow-tow at the shrine of materialism, quoting approved mantras from Golems of orthodoxy: "The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is they way the world works." But, oh reader, this is a little disingenuous; they do like it; and more than that, they choose it; and far worse than that, they say we should also worship this way. For this book, any quibbles about whether their equations really constitute a Theory of Everything are mere calculational impasse, whereas the real impasse is these human calculators themselves, these cosmic accountants who boast that the only real is the repeatably measurable; 'don't ask what it means, just ask how much'.
To read The Elegant Universe is to read the diary of a cultist, complete with guru (Ed Witten), gatherings ('Strings 2001' anyone?) and intense argument by the initiated over the minutiae of dogma. The rallying cry carried by this sect in to the world, its claim to our obeisance, is the avoidance of inconsistency. Because, perish the thought, the two sacred pillars of modern physics are in conflict! Yes indeed, toss the phosphorus of Quantum Theory in to the ocean of General Relativity and you get the fizz of infinite discord. The book is a good explicator of why, and worth having to hand for that, picturing the violent quantum foam that virtual particle mass-energy stirs up in gravity at the smallest lengths. The Apollonian symmetry of General Relativity, the cosmic geometers arc of covenant that the universe is indeed calculable, receives rude raspberries from unsolvable infinities as, uninvited, trickster Eshu(2) scrapes quantum chalk across the white man's blackboard. Ha ha ha. But for theoretical physicists this is a self-admitted 'nightmare' and so the book ploughs headlong in to the superstring recipe for soothing the dreams of Order.
And there is an appealingly surreal beauty to these dreams. Most Dali-esque is the addition of spray of extra space-time dimensions; although we think we live in a 3-D world, superstring theory places us in 11 dimensions (including time), the rest of which are curled away out of sight like infinitesimal pubic hairs. And these dimensions don't form an orderly queue but warp and bend in to convoluted Calabi-Yau shapes; a fabric of spacetime conjoured by the deranged spirit of Gaudi(3). All in the name of calculational consistency. But the dreams of Order are doomed; for the game was up a long time ago, betrayed by metaphor and by mathematics itself.
Seeing Reality as loops of stuff which Appearance clings to is no break from Greek-ist dogma; following the Möbius(4) strips of myopic objectivity to its own limits as a materialist metaphor will always lead to more and more layers of 'fundamental' constituents. String Theory itself may alert us to the sell-by-date of the 'space' metaphor by setting a limit to smallness: no physically accessible distance to be less than (you guessed it!) the Planck length. But this Parkinsonism of the lumps-of-stuff-in-space worldview doesn't situate Being, despite the text's late namechecking of Leibniz. Better take a leaf out of A. N. Whitehead's book 'Science and The Modern World' (pub. 1925). At least he faced up to the New Physics, arguing for an organical universe where each event is a prehension (gathering in) of all others; the non-dual connectivity always already expressed by mystics. The spatial metaphor of 'simple location' is for the simple minded, for controllers not for those caressed by existence.
And despite all this massive warping of branes and brains to avoid the cataclysm of inconsistency the tools themselves writhe in the scientists' hands. All physics, not just the string variety, rests on the assumption that maths can map Reality; and more, that the mathematical mappings (the laws of physics) represent the really Real. But along came good old Gödel and showed that 'All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions'. Oh my goodness; up pops Derridean deconstruction at the core of pure maths. Gödel's result affirms that Strange Loops of the form 'This statement is a lie' lurk in the sacred Torah of Materialist Abstraction. If String Theorists ever unfurl the curled dimensions, they'll find Gödel's smile.
The refreshing authenticity in this book is its confession of science's fear of chaos, but nowhere does it say why we should instead find Elegance fulfilling. Nowhere is there a hint that perhaps other dimensions of existence than the postulated eleven need feeding, or that physicists own hunger emerges from this same source. Instead we pile straight in to string theory; full on Pythagorean Harmonies(5) of vibration without any nod to our need for these ancient analogies. Only to say that in superstring theory "these musical metaphors take on a startling reality". Ah-hem; did they say reality? From a bunch of math-heads who never made one experimentally verifiable prediction from their theory? From a book that doesn't even acknowledge Popper (scientific 'laws' are merely the 'not yet falsified') let alone Kuhn ('the reigning theory is a paradigm whose popularity is socially constructed')?
This string theory isn't super, its sinister; immersed in the mytho-political matrix of a mercantile Leviathan these colonialist calculators dismiss other wisdom as peasant superstition. They offer us a vibrating vision with no power to move the heartstrings; for we are absent from their spacetime. No Minkowski(6) map refers to the physicist whose mind imagines it. Bishop Berkley(7) rumbled this one long ago, although it waited for the Situationists(8) to take it to the streets in '68. Science measurements are recursive rituals, serving a Utilitarian Universe; deductive dullness in a closed system. Greek tragedy transposed to seminars, the grinding inevitability of impersonal Law; they try to hypnotise us against hubris while oh so bravely facing up to awesome emptiness - pah! This dead universe is the projection of their limbic system; emotional scar tissue mapped by the COBE(9) satellite.
What string-heads seek isn't experiential unity but mathematical uniqueness. Embarrassingly for them there are several string theories which could be equally valid descriptions of the physical world (Type I,IIA & IIB string theories as well as Heterotic-E and Heterotic-O). Luckily the guru stepped in with M-Theory; strings aren't just strings but tightly rolled membranes. In fact, the fundamental constituents of M-Theory are now membrane-like shapes in any of p dimensions, where p can be up to nine; string theorists use the term p-branes(!!) to label these shapes. But the M in their M-Theory really stands for Modernist - an architectural plan for the salvation of Totalising Truth. String-heads drop terms like 'Holy Grail' unselfconsciously, their passion for purity projected in to a glowing M-Theory that hovers just out of reach.
String Theorists are the hollow men, Heads filled with Straw, whose dark inner suns glow at the 0.00000000001K of Black Hole radiation. General Relativity may have been 'proved' by Eddington's eclipse measurements in 1919, but his results were erroneous, faked by his faith in the vision of Einstein. And yet science, in denial, still disses the irrational. Wheeler(10) says of General Relativity that 'mass grips space by telling it how to curve', but Fourier(11) said it is erotic attraction which really moves the universe, with stars and planets passional; not geodesic desert but the play of aromal rays. I know which 3-body problem I prefer, however similarly resistant it is to an analytical solution. Hawking boasts of how virtual photon pairs are ripped apart in the vicinity of a Black Hole, but at least the Shaman's dismemberment is experiential, and heals others. Elsewhere than Eddington in 1919, real Experimentalists tried more participatory paradigm shifts, such as the short-lived Soviets and Communes of Cork, Munich and Glasgow(12) which flashed in and out of existence faster than required by the Heisenberg's Utopian Principle(13), sucked back past the Schwarzchild(14) radius of The State.
String Theory is a desperate attempt to throw a net of order across the universe. What dimensions lie curled up in their hearts that they must flee to cosmic certitude? Is it a fear of their own inconsistencies, their own paradoxical multiplicities? All this additional geometry: eleven damn dimensions and not one that bridges matter and spirit. How can they see the most important dualism as the one that links Type I string theory to Heterotic-O? Can they be that blind to the severance of mind and body by Occam's razor(15)? Such spirits shrivel to less than the Planck length, and we are left with the challenge thrown by Calabrian metaphysician & revolutionary Giordano Bruno; how golden is our Inner Sun?
dan, february 2001
NOTES
1. 'Saggy old cloth cat' (1970's kids TV programme)
2. Eshu-Elegbara; West African Trickster deity
3. very like those bits stuck on top of the Sagrada Cathedral in Barcelona
4. endless single-surface loop (you can make one out a twisted strip of paper!)
5. His cosmology consists of nine fundamental vibrational modes. Interestingly, Pythagoras studied for twenty-odd years in Egypt.
6. A way of representing special relativity by graphing the trajectory of an object against both space & time axes
7. A sharp guy, despite being an Xtian
8. Check them out!
9. Cosmic Background Explorer; a satellite that mapped ripples in the radiation echo of the Big Bang
10. John Wheeler, contemporary physics big cheese
11. Inspired utopian, active at the start of the 19th century
12. See, for example, the book by Liam Cahill - 'Forgotten Revolution: Limerick Soviet 1919' (Dublin: O'Brien press)
13. the limit to the product DE *DT, where DE is energy of liberation and DT is time until state repression
14. the Black Hole event horizon; nothing escapes!
15. Basic scientific principle: 'any explanation should make the minimum number of assumptions'. Unfortunately blind to the prejudicial assumptions of scientistic materialism, & acts like a Jack-the-Ripper of reductionism
