The Elegant Universe Read Online Free PDF

having to do with nature’s most fundamental constituents and forces. Of equal importance, although somewhat harder to convey, is the remarkable elegance of both the answers and the framework for answers that string theory proposes. For instance, in string theory many aspects of nature that might appear to be arbitrary technical details—such as the number of distinct fundamental particle ingredients and their respective properties—are found to arise from essential and tangible aspects of the geometry of the universe. If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos. Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature’s basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.
    In the final analysis, though, nothing is a substitute for definitive, testable predictions that can determine whether string theory has truly lifted the veil of mystery hiding the deepest truths of our universe. It may be some time before our level of comprehension has reached sufficient depth to achieve this aim, although, as we will discuss in Chapter 9, experimental tests could provide strong circumstantial support for string theory within the next ten years or so. Moreover, in Chapter 13 we will see that string theory has recently solved a central puzzle concerning black holes, associated with the so-called Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, that has stubbornly resisted resolution by more conventional means for more than twenty-five years. This success has convinced many that string theory is in the process of giving us our deepest understanding of how the universe works.
    Edward Witten, one of the pioneers and leading experts in string theory, summarizes the situation by saying that “string theory is a part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century,” an assessment first articulated by the celebrated Italian physicist Danielle Amati.5 In a sense, then, it is as if our forebears in the late nineteenth century had been presented with a modern-day supercomputer, without the operating instructions. Through inventive trial and error, hints of the supercomputer’s power would have become evident, but it would have taken vigorous and prolonged effort to gain true mastery. The hints of the computer’s potential, like our glimpses of string theory’s explanatory power, would have provided extremely strong motivation for obtaining complete facility. A similar motivation today energizes a generation of theoretical physicists to pursue a full and precise analytic understanding of string theory.
    Witten’s remark and those of other experts in the field indicate that it could be decades or even centuries before string theory is fully developed and understood. This may well be true. In fact, the mathematics of string theory is so complicated that, to date, no one even knows the exact equations of the theory. Instead, physicists know only approximations to these equations, and even the approximate equations are so complicated that they as yet have been only partially solved. Nevertheless, an inspiring set of breakthroughs in the latter half of the 1990s—breakthroughs that have answered theoretical questions of hitherto unimaginable difficulty—may well indicate that complete quantitative understanding of string theory is much closer than initially thought. Physicists worldwide are developing powerful new techniques to transcend the numerous approximate methods so far used, collectively piecing together disparate elements of the string theory puzzle at an exhilarating rate.
    Surprisingly, these developments are providing new vantage points for reinterpreting some of the basic aspects of the theory that have been in place for some time. For instance, a natural question that may have occurred to you in looking