Antiphony Read Online Free PDF Page B

the violins and violas into a set of the subatomic strings that are at the heart of his research. The image he keeps in his head to help him visualize his work emerges—a loop of pure energy plucked by a finger on a hand that materializes from nowhere, the loop of energy twanging in the pattern of a seven-pointed star, a type of harmonics he finds particularly pleasing to envision. Then, he sees this star of light shift to another shape, another pattern of vibration, as the energy poured through it is increased—another pluck of the finger. And this string of light is merely the three-dimensional snapshot of a higher-dimensional object—his mind’s eye transposes it as a three-dimensional star-shape collapsing into the vibrating twodimensionalstar-string—when, in fact it is really either a ten- or eleven-dimensional energy string passing through the screen of his own limited energy spacetime. But when he keeps his eye focused on the vibrating star of energy and adds others to it, interacting with it, he starts to conjure a swarming field of these vibrating loops and open-ended shoestrings, all buzzing with the excitations of their various levels of energy—and he achieves the fullest sense he can of visualizing the math that goes into creating String Theory. None of this is precisely accurate, but he sees a semi-transparent window of buzzing stars and loops and shoestrings forming into fields of energy that, in turn, interact to create matter, to create objects such as the thick sound-deadening pile of the carpet his shoes are treading on. All of the many things he sees around him, the walls, and comfortable leather-covered chairs, tables, and doors to the many conference rooms lining this corridor are simply half-frozen sheets of energy, slowed down enough to be within the range of his perception as solid objects. And his own research, the subject of the speech he is about to give, is merely the proof that one of the terms in the chain of mathematical equations that describe this gorgeous sea of bustling energy is finite. Because it is finite, in the world of science and math as he knows it, it does indeed exist. What could be more simple?
    His vision of that chain of terms in the mathematical equations describing String Theory always appears to him as a sequence of numbers, starting with a very large 1, and continuing on through 2, 3, 4, and beyond, each numeral growing a bit smaller as they stretch out before him into the far distance of the horizon. He has solved for 4, the fourth term—a very importantaccomplishment. And now, all he has to do is translate this beautiful vision he is holding in his head into words. He must simply fill in the gaps between the bullet points on his presentation slides. But… that phrase carved into the stall of the bathroom crowds into view, supplanting the lovely vibrating strings and the numbers receding into darkness.
    T HE W ORD I S A L IE .
    What if everything he is about to tell them is untrue?
    It can’t be. There are too many wise men who have spent their entire lives documenting, calculating, and expounding upon the theory of the vibrating strings. The gorgeous economy of it—the fact that all the equations describing the forces and particles known to man can be boiled down to the simple condition that strings must take up the least amount of spacetime possible. The mere geometry of strings is enough to explain the way the world works, at least on the flat, two-dimensional level of a chalkboard. But there are doubters. The elegant equations cannot be physically tested, at least with the particle colliders that exist now. There have been beautiful mathematical theories before that ended up proving nothing. And even though the math is lovely on paper, when he tries to project it onto the physical world where he lives, the ever-changing relativistic universe of Einstein, all sorts of infinities and singularities annihilate the beautiful