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at Figure 1.1 is, Why strings? Why not little frisbee disks? Or microscopic bloblike nuggets? Or a combination of all of these possibilities? As we shall see in Chapter 12, the most recent insights show that these other kinds of ingredients do have an important role in string theory, and have revealed that string theory is actually part of an even grander synthesis currently (and mysteriously) named M-theory. These latest developments will be the subject of the final chapters of this book.
    Progress in science proceeds in fits and starts. Some periods are filled with great breakthroughs; at other times researchers experience dry spells. Scientists put forward results, both theoretical and experimental. The results are debated by the community, sometimes they are discarded, sometimes they are modified, and sometimes they provide inspirational jumping-off points for new and more accurate ways of understanding the physical universe. In other words, science proceeds along a zig-zag path toward what we hope will be ultimate truth, a path that began with humanity’s earliest attempts to fathom the cosmos and whose end we cannot predict. Whether string theory is an incidental rest stop along this path, a landmark turning point, or in fact the final destination we do not know. But the last two decades of research by hundreds of dedicated physicists and mathematicians from numerous countries have given us well-founded hope that we are on the right and possibly final track.
    It is a telling testament of the rich and far-reaching nature of string theory that even our present level of understanding has allowed us to gain striking new insights into the workings of the universe. A central thread in what follows will be those developments that carry forward the revolution in our understanding of space and time initiated by Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. We will see that if string theory is correct, the fabric of our universe has properties that would likely have dazzled even Einstein.
    Part II: The Dilemma of Space, Time, and the Quanta

The Elegant Universe

Chapter 2
    Space, Time, and the Eye of the Beholder
    I
    n June 1905, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein submitted a technical article to the Annals of Physics in which he came to grips with a paradox about light that had first troubled him as a teenager, some ten years earlier. Upon turning the final page of Einstein’s manuscript, the editor of the journal, Max Planck, realized that the accepted scientific order had been overthrown. Without hoopla or fanfare, a patent clerk from Bern, Switzerland, had completely overturned the traditional notions of space and time and replaced them with a new conception whose properties fly in the face of everything we are familiar with from common experience.
    The paradox that had troubled Einstein for a decade was this. In the mid-1800s, after a close study of the experimental work of the English physicist Michael Faraday, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell succeeded in uniting electricity and magnetism in the framework of the electromagnetic field. If you’ve ever been on a mountaintop just before a severe thunderstorm or stood close to a Van de Graaf generator, you have a visceral sense of what an electromagnetic field is, because you’ve felt it. In case you haven’t, it is somewhat like a tide of electric and magnetic lines of force that permeate a region of space through which they pass. When you sprinkle iron filings near a magnet, for example, the orderly pattern they form traces out some of the invisible lines of magnetic force. When you take off a wool sweater on an especially dry day and hear a crackling sound and perhaps feel a momentary shock or two, you are witnessing evidence of electric lines of force generated by electric charges swept up by the fibers in your sweater. Beyond uniting these and all other electric and magnetic phenomena in one mathematical framework, Maxwell’s theory