The Elegant Universe (46 page)

This was a wonderful and important insight. But its full power was not revealed until a short time later.

Tearing the Fabric of Space—with Conviction

One of the most exciting things about physics is how the state of knowledge can change literally overnight. The morning after Strominger posted his paper on the electronic Internet archive, I read it in my office at Cornell after having retrieved it from the World Wide Web. In one stroke, Strominger had made use of the exciting new insights of string theory to resolve one of the thorniest issues surrounding the curling up of extra dimensions into a Calabi-Yau space. But as I pondered his paper, it struck me that he might have worked out only half of the story.

In the earlier space-tearing flop-transition work described in Chapter 11, we had studied a two-part process in which a two-dimensional sphere pinches down to a point, causing the fabric of space to tear, and then the two-dimensional sphere reinflates in a new way, thereby repairing the tear. In Strominger’s paper, he had studied what happens when a three-dimensional sphere pinches down to a point, and had shown that the newfound extended objects in string theory ensure that physics continues to be perfectly well behaved. But that’s where his paper stopped. Might it be that there was another half to the story, involving, once again, the tearing of space and its subsequent repair through the reinflation of spheres?

Dave Morrison was visiting me at Cornell during the spring term of 1995, and that afternoon we got together to discuss Strominger’s paper. Within a couple of hours we had an outline of what the “second half of the story” might look like. Drawing on some insights from the late 1980s of the mathematicians Herb Clemens of the University of Utah, Robert Friedman of Columbia University, and Miles Reid of the University of Warwick, as applied by Candelas, Green, and Tristan Hübsch, then of the University of Texas at Austin, we realized that when a three-dimensional sphere collapses, it may be possible for the Calabi-Yau space to tear and subsequently repair itself by reinflating the sphere. But there is an important surprise. Whereas the sphere that collapsed had three dimensions, the one that reinflates has only two. It’s hard to picture what this looks like, but we can get an idea by focusing on a lower-dimensional analogy. Rather than the hard-to-picture case of a three-dimensional sphere collapsing and being replaced by a two-dimensional sphere, let’s imagine a one-dimensional sphere collapsing and being replaced by a zero-dimensional sphere.

First of all, what are one- and zero-dimensional spheres? Well, let’s reason by analogy. A two-dimensional sphere is the collection of points in three-dimensional space that are the same distance from a chosen center, as shown in Figure 13.2(a). By following the same idea, a one-dimensional sphere is the collection of points in two-dimensional space (the surface of this page, for example) that are the same distance from a chosen center. As shown in Figure 13.2(b), this is nothing but a circle. Finally, following the pattern, a zero-dimensional sphere is the collection of points in a one-dimensional space (a line) that are the same distance from a chosen center. As shown in Figure 13.2(c), this amounts to two points, with the “radius” of the zero-dimensional sphere equal to the distance each point is from their common center. And so, the lower-dimensional analogy alluded to in the preceding paragraph involves a circle (a one-dimensional sphere) pinching down, followed by space tearing, and then being replaced by a zero-dimensional sphere (two points). Figure 13.3 puts this abstract idea into practice.

We imagine beginning with the surface of a doughnut, in which a one-dimensional sphere (a circle) is embedded, as highlighted in Figure 13.3. Now, let’s imagine that as time goes by, the highlighted circle collapses, causing the fabric of space to pinch. We can repair the pinch by allowing the fabric to momentarily tear, and then replacing the pinched one-dimensional sphere—the collapsed circle—with a zero-dimensional sphere-two points-plugging the holes in the upper and lower portions of the shape arising from the tear. As shown in Figure 13.3, the resulting shape looks like a warped banana, which through gentle deformation (non-space tearing) can be reshaped smoothly into the surface of a beach ball. We see, therefore, that when a one-dimensional sphere collapses and is replaced by a zero-dimensional sphere, the topology of the original doughnut, that is, its fundamental shape, is drastically altered, In the context of the curled-up spatial dimensions, the space-tearing progression of Figure 13.3 would result in the universe depicted in Figure 8.8 evolving into that depicted in Figure 8.7.

Although this is a lower-dimensional analogy, it captures the essential features of what Morrison and I foresaw for the second half of Strominger’s story. After the collapse of a three-dimensional sphere inside a Calabi-Yau space, it seemed to us that space could tear and subsequently repair itself by growing a two-dimensional sphere, leading to far more drastic changes in topology than Witten and we had found in our earlier work (discussed in Chapter 11). In this way, one Calabi-Yau shape could, in essence, transform itself into a completely different Calabi-Yau shape-much like the doughnut transforming into the beach ball in Figure 13.3—while string physics remained perfectly well behaved. Although a picture was starting to emerge, we knew that there were significant aspects that we would need to work out before we could establish that our second half of the story did not introduce any singularities—that is, pernicious and physically unacceptable consequences. We each went home that evening with the tentative elation that we were sitting on a major new insight.

A Flurry of E-Mail

The next morning I received an e-mail from Strominger asking me for any comments or reactions to his paper. He mentioned that “it should tie in somehow with your work with Aspinwall and Morrison,” because, as it turned out, he too had been exploring a possible connection to the phenomenon of topology change. I immediately sent him an e-mail describing the rough outline Morrison and I had come up with. When he responded, it was clear that his level of excitement matched what Morrison and I had been riding since the preceding day.

During the next few days a continuous stream of e-mail messages circulated between the three of us as we sought feverishly to put quantitative rigor behind our idea of drastic space-tearing topology change. Slowly but surely, all the details fell into place. By the following Wednesday, a week after Strominger posted his initial insight, we had a draft of a joint paper spelling out the dramatic new transformation of the spatial fabric that can follow the collapse of a three-dimensional sphere.

Strominger was scheduled to give a seminar at Harvard the next day, and so left Santa Barbara in the early morning. We agreed that Morrison and I would continue to fine-tune the paper and then submit it to the electronic archive that evening. By 11:45 P.M., we had checked and rechecked our calculations and everything seemed to hang together perfectly. And so, we electronically submitted our paper and headed out of the physics building. As Morrison and I walked toward my car (I was going to drive him to the house he had rented for the term) our discussion turned to one of devil’s advocacy, in which we imagined the harshest criticisms that someone determined not to accept our results might level. As we drove out of the parking lot and left the campus, we realized that although our arguments were strong and convincing, they were not thoroughly airtight. Neither of us felt that there was any real chance that our work was wrong, but we did recognize that the strength of our claims and the particular wording we had chosen at a few points in the paper might leave the ideas open to rancorous debate, potentially obscuring the importance of the results. We agreed that it might have been better had we written the paper in a somewhat lower key, underplaying the depth of the claims, and allowing the physics community to judge the paper on its merits, rather than possibly reacting to the form of its presentation.

As we drove on, Morrison reminded me that under the rules of the electronic archive we could revise our paper until 2 A.M., when it would then be released for public Internet access. I immediately turned the car around and we drove back to the physics building, retrieved our initial submission, and set to work on toning down the prose. Thankfully, it was quite easy to do. A few word changes in critical paragraphs softened the edge of our claims without compromising the technical content. Within an hour, we resubmitted the paper, and agreed not to talk about it at all during the drive to Morrison’s house.

By early the next afternoon it was evident that the response to our paper was enthusiastic. Among the many e-mail responses was one from Plesser, who gave us one of the highest compliments one physicist can give another by declaring, “I wish that I had thought of that!” Notwithstanding our fears the previous night, we had convinced the string theory community that not only can the fabric of space undergo the mild tears discovered earlier (Chapter 11), but that far more drastic rips, roughly illustrated by Figure 13.3, can occur as well.

Returning to Black Holes and Elementary Particles

What does this have to do with black holes and elementary particles? A lot. To see this, we must ask ourselves the same question we posed in Chapter 11. What are the observable physical consequences of such tears in the fabric of space? For flop transitions, as we have seen, the surprising answer to this question was that not much happens at all. For conifold transitions—the technical name for the drastic space-tearing transitions we had now found—there is, once again, no physical catastrophe (as there would be in conventional general relativity), but there are more pronounced observable consequences.

Two related notions underlie these observable consequences; we will explain each in turn. First, as we have discussed, Strominger’s initial breakthrough was his realization that a three-dimensional sphere inside a Calabi-Yau space can collapse without an ensuing disaster, because a three-brane wrapped around it provides a perfect protective shield. But what does such a wrapped-brane configuration look like? The answer comes from earlier work of Horowitz and Strominger, which showed that to persons such as ourselves who are directly cognizant only of the three extended spatial dimensions, the three-brane “smeared” around the three-dimensional sphere will set up a gravitational field that looks like that of a black hole.2 This is not obvious and becomes clear only from a detailed study of the equations governing the branes. Again, it’s hard to draw such higher-dimensional configurations accurately on a page, but Figure 13.4 conveys the rough idea with a lower-dimensional analogy involving twodimensional spheres. We see that a two-dimensional membrane can smear itself around a two-dimensional sphere (which itself is sitting inside a Calabi-Yau space positioned at some location in the extended dimensions). Someone looking through the extended dimensions toward this location will sense the wrapped brane by its mass and the force charges it carries, properties that Horowitz and Strominger had shown would look just like those of a black hole. Moreover, in Strominger’s 1995 breakthrough paper, he argued that the mass of the three-brane—the mass of the black hole, that is—is proportional to the volume of the three-dimensional sphere it wraps: The bigger the volume of the sphere, the bigger the three-brane must be in order to wrap around it, and the more massive it becomes. Similarly, the smaller the volume of the sphere, the smaller the mass of the three-brane that wraps it. As this sphere collapses, then, a three-brane that wraps around the sphere, which is perceived as a black hole, appears to become ever lighter. When the three-dimensional sphere has collapsed to a pinched point, the corresponding black hole—brace yourself—is massless. Although it sounds completely mysterious—what in the world is a massless black hole?—we will soon connect this enigma with more familiar string physics.

The second ingredient we need to recall is that the number of holes in a Calabi-Yau shape, as discussed in Chapter 9, determines the number of low-energy, and hence low-mass, vibrational string patterns, the patterns that can possibly account for the particles in Table 1.1 as well as the force carriers. Since the space-tearing conifold transitions change the number of holes (as, for example in Figure 13.3, in which the hole of the doughnut is eliminated by the tearing/repairing process), we expect a change in the number of low-mass vibrational patterns. Indeed, when Morrison, Strominger, and I studied this in detail, we found that as a new two-dimensional sphere replaces the pinched three-dimensional sphere in the curled-up Calabi-Yau dimensions, the number of massless string vibrational patterns increases by exactly one. (The example of the doughnut turning into a beach ball in Figure 13.3 would lead you to believe that the number of holes—and thus the number of patterns—decreases, but this proves to be a misleading property of the lower-dimensional analogy.)

To combine the observations of the preceding two paragraphs, imagine a sequence of snapshots of a Calabi-Yau space in which the size of a particular three-dimensional sphere gets smaller and smaller. The first observation implies that a three-brane wrapping around this three-dimensional sphere—which appears to us as a black hole—will have ever smaller mass until, at the final point of collapse, it will be massless. But, as we asked above, what does this mean? The answer became clear to us by invoking the second observation. Our work showed that the new massless pattern of string vibration arising from the space-tearing conifold transition is the microscopic description of a massless particle into which the black hole has transmuted. We concluded that as a Calabi-Yau shape goes through a space-tearing conifold transition, an initially massive black hole becomes ever lighter until it is massless and then it transmutes into a massless particle—such as a massless photon—which in string theory is nothing but a single string executing a particular vibrational pattern. In this way, for the first time, string theory explicitly establishes a direct, concrete, and quantitatively unassailable connection between black holes and elementary particles.