The String Theory

A Look Into The Deep

 BASICS

Theoretical physicists use mathematics to describe certain aspects of Nature. Sir

Isaac Newton was the first theoretical physicist, although in his own time his
profession was called "natural philosophy".

By Newton's era people had already used algebra and geometry to build
marvelous works of architecture, including the great cathedrals of Europe, but
algebra and geometry only describe things that are sitting still. In order to
describe things that are moving or changing in some way, Newton invented
calculus.

The most puzzling and intriguing moving things visible to humans have always
been the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars we can see in the night sky.
Newton's new calculus, combined with his "Laws of Motion", made a
mathematical model for the force of gravity that not only described the observed
motions of planets and stars in the night sky, but also of swinging weights and
flying cannonballs in England.

Today's theoretical physicists are often working on the boundaries of known

mathematics, sometimes inventing new mathematics as they need it, like Newton
did with calculus.

Newton was both a theorist and an experimentalist. He spent many many long
hours, to the point of neglecting his health, observing the way Nature behaved so
that he might describe it better. The so-called "Newton's Laws of Motion" are not
abstract laws that Nature is somehow forced to obey, but the observed behavior
of Nature that is described in the language of mathematics. In Newton's time,
theory and experiment went together.

Today the functions of theory and observation are divided into two distinct
communities in physics. Both experiments and theories are much more complex
than back in Newton's time. Theorists are exploring areas of Nature in
mathematics that technology so far does not allow us to observe in experiments.
Many of the theoretical physicists who are alive today may not live to see how the
real Nature compares with her mathematical description in their work. Today's
theorists have to learn to live with ambiguity and uncertainty in their mission to
describe Nature using math.

Theoretical physicists today still use a core technology that was developed in the
18th century out of the calculus pioneered by Isaac Newton and Gottfried von
Leibniz.

Isaac Newton derived his three Laws of Motion through close, almost obsessive
observation and experimentation, as well as mathematical reasoning. The
relationship he discovered between force and acceleration, which he expressed in
his own arcane notation of fluxions, has had the most impact on the world in the
differential notation used by his professional rival, Wilhelm von Leibniz, as the
familiar differential equation from freshman physics:

After Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in the discovery of calculus, Leibniz'

vastly more convenient and intuitive differential and integral notation failed to
become popular in England, and so the majority of advances in the development
of calculus in the next century took place in France and Germany.

At the University of Basel, the multitalented Leonhard Euler began to develop

the calculus of variations that was to become the most important tool in the tool
kit of the theoretical physicist. The calculus of variations was useful for finding
curves that were the maximal or minimal length given some set of conditions.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange took Euler's results and applied them to Newtonian

mechanics. The general principle that emerged from the work of Euler and
Lagrange is now called the Principle of Least Action, which could be called the
core technology of modern theoretical physics.

In the Principal of Least Action, the differential equations of motion of a given

physical system are derived by minimizing the action of the system in question.
For a finite system of objects, the action S is an integral over time of a function
called the Lagrange function or Lagrangian L(q, dq/dt), which depends on the set
of generalized coordinates and velocities (q, dq/dt) of the system in question.

The differential equations that describe the motion of the system are found by
demanding that the action be at its minimum (or maximum) value, where the
functional differential of the action vanishes:

This condition gives rise to the Euler-Lagrange equations

which, when applied to the Lagrangian of the system in question, gives the
equations of motion for the system.

As an example, take the system of a single massive particle with space

coordinate x (in zero gravity). The Lagrangian is just the kinetic energy, and the
action is the energy integrated over time:
 The Euler-Lagrange equations that minimize the action just reproduce Newton's
equation of motion for a free particle with no external forces:

The set of mathematical methods described above are collectively known as the
Lagrangian formalism of mechanics. In 1834, Dublin mathematician William
Rowan Hamilton applied his work on characteristic functions in optics to
Newtonian mechanics, and what is now called the Hamiltonian formalism of
mechanics was born.

The idea that Hamilton borrowed from optics was the concept of a function
whose value remains constant along any path in the configuration space of the
system, unless the final and initial points are varied. This function in mechanics is
now called the Hamiltonian and represents the total energy of the system. The
Hamiltonian formalism is related to the Lagrangian formalism by a
transformation, called a Legendre transformation, from coordinates and velocities
(q, dq/dt) to coordinates and momenta (q,p):

The equations of motions are derived from the Hamiltonian through the
Hamiltonian equivalent of the Euler-Lagrange equations:

For a massive particle in zero gravity moving in one dimension, the Hamiltonian
is just the kinetic energy, which in terms of momentum, not velocity, is just:

If the coordinate q is just the position of the particle along the x axis then the
equations of motion become:

which is equivalent to the answer derived from the Lagrangian formalism.

Classical mechanics would have had a brief history if only the motion of finite
objects such as cannonballs and planets could be studied. But the Lagrangian
formalism and the method of differential equations proved well adaptable to the
study of continuous media, including the flows of fluids and vibrations of
continuous n-dimensional objects such as one-dimensional strings and two-
dimensional membranes.

The Lagrangian formalism is extended to continuous systems by the use of a

Lagrangian density integrated over time and the D-dimensional spatial volume of
the system, instead of a Lagrange function integrated just over time. The
generalized coordinates q are now the fields q(x) distributed over space, and we
have made a transition from classical mechanics to classical field theory. The
action is now written:

Here the coordinate xa refers to both time and space, and repetition implies a
sum over all D+1 dimensions of space and time.

For continuous media the Euler-Lagrange equations become

with functional differentiation of the Lagrange density replacing ordinary

differentiation of the Lagrange function.

What is the meaning of the abstract symbol q(x)? This type of function in
physics that depends on space and time is called a field, and the physics of fields
is called, of course, field theory.

The first important classical field theory was Newton's Law of Gravitation,
where the gravitational force between two particles of masses m1 and m2 can be
written as:

The gravitation force F can be seen as deriving from a gravitational field G,

which if we set x1=0 and x2=x, can be written as:

Newton's Law of Gravitation was the beginning of classical field theory. But the
greatest achievement of classical field theory came 200 years later and gave birth
to the modern era of telecommunications.

Physicists and mathematicians in the 19th century were intensely occupied with
understanding electricity and magnetism. In the late 19th century, James Clerk
Maxwell found unified equations of motion of the electric and magnetic fields, now
known as Maxwell's equations. The Maxwell equations in the absence of any
charges or currents are:

Maxwell discovered that there exist electromagnetic traveling wave solutions to

these equations, which can be rewritten as

and in 1873 he postulated that these electromagnetic waves solved the ongoing
question as to the nature of light.

The greatest year in classical field theory came in 1884 when Heinrich Hertz
generated and studied the first radio waves in his laboratory. Hertz confirmed
Maxwell's prediction and changed the world, and physics, forever.

Maxwell's theoretical unification of electricity and magnetism was engineered

into the modern human power to communicate across space at the speed of light.
This was a stunning and powerful achievement for theporetical physics, one that
shaped the face of coming 20th century as the century of global
telecommunications.

But this was just the beginning. In the century that was just arriving, the power
of theoretical physics would grow to question the very nature of reality, space
and time, and the technological consequences would be even bigger.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Newton's mathematical description of motion

using calculus and his model for the gravitational force were extended very
successfully to the emerging science and technology of electromagnetism.
Calculus evolved into classical field theory.

Once electromagnetic fields were thoroughly described using mathematics, many

physicists felt that the field was finished, that there was nothing left to describe
or explain.

Then the electron was discovered, and particle physics was born. Through the
mathematics of quantum mechanics and experimental observation, it was
deduced that all known particles fell into one of two classes: bosons or fermions.
Bosons are particles that transmit forces. Many bosons can occupy the same state
at the same time. This is not true for fermions, only one fermion can occupy a
given state at a given time, and this is why fermions are the particles that make
up matter. This is why solids can't pass through one another, why we can't walk
through walls -- because of Pauli repulsion -- the inability of fermions (matter)
to share the same space the way bosons (forces) can.

While particle physics was developing with quantum mechanics, increasing

observational evidence indicated that light, as electromagnetic radiation, travelled
at one fixed speed (in a vacuum) in every direction, according to every observer.
This discovery and the mathematics that Einstein developed to describe it and
model it in his Special Theory of Relativity, when combined with the later
development of quantum mechanics, gave birth to the rich subject of relativistic
quantum field theory. Relativistic quantum field theory is the foundation of our
present theoretical ability to describe the behavior of the subatomic particles
physicists have been observing and studying in the latter half of the 20th century.

But Einstein then extended his Special Theory of Relativity to encompass

Newton's theory of gravitation, and the result, Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity, brought the mathematics called differential geometry into physics.

General relativity has had many observational successes that proved its worth as
a description of Nature, but two of the predictions of this theory have staggered
the public and scientific imaginations: the expanding Universe, and black holes.
Both have been observed, and both encapsulate issues that, at least in the
mathematics, brush up against the very nature of reality and existence.

The sense of achievement and closure for theoretical physics that came with the
brilliant success of the classical field theory of electromagnetism was short lived.
The new technology invented out of the mathematical unification of electricity
with magnetism produced copious data about the nature of matter and light that
snapped all of the mathematical threads that physicists had just succeeded in
tying down.

And after this new data was unraveled and understood and explained using
mathematics, the unified worldview of classical theoretical physics became split
into two very different views of the universe -- the particle view and the
geometric view.

Particles and waves

The first sign of trouble was when J.J. Thomson discovered the electron in
1897. Experimentalists began to see data that suggested a model of the atom
with negatively charged particles orbiting around a positively charged core. But
according to Maxwell's equations, such a system should be physically unstable.
Classical field theory was unable to explain or describe the emerging data on
atomic structure.

Another big mystery that came out of Maxwell's equations was the thermal
behavior of light. Hot objects, like a hot coal, glow by emitting light and that light
is observed to consist of a distribution of waves of different frequencies. But
physicists who tried to explain the observed distribution of frequencies using light
waves as described by Maxwell's equations met with continued failure.
 Then as the new 20th century was beginning, a young German physicist, in an
"act of despair" over the gaps in the understanding of thermal radiation, made a
guess called the Quantum Hypothesis, which explained the observed thermal
spectrum of light as coming from a collection of identical discrete quanta of
energy. His formula worked, but he didn't know why.

This was the beginning of the idea known as particle-wave duality, and the field
of quantum mechanics.

Einstein used Planck's idea to explain the newly-observed photoelectric effect.

Einstein proposed that light was emitted or absorbed by an excited electron in
discrete quanta called photons whose energy was proportional to the frequency of
the light according to the relation

where h is a number called Planck's constant, determined by measurement to be

6.6 x 10-34 joule seconds.

If a light wave could behave like a particle, then could a particle behave like a
wave of some kind? In 1923, French aristocrat Louis de Broglie put forward the
idea that an electron traveling with some momentum p could act like a
continuous wave with wavelength l according to the relation

When the dust was settled, the new quantum theory described a given physical
system not in terms of the path of a particle or the strength of a field, but as the
probability amplitude for a given system to be in a given quantum state. This
probability amplitude is the square of a function called the wave function Y(x,t),
which is a solution to the Schrodinger equation

Solutions to Schödinger equation for more then one identical particle have an
interesting symmetry. For example, let's consider a two particle system and
exchange the two particles. The wave function will obey the relation

In the plus case, the two particles are what we call bosons. Two bosons can
occupy the same quantum state at the same time.

In the minus case, the two particles are what we call fermions. Two fermions
cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time. This effect is called
Pauli repulsion, and Pauli repulsion explains the structure of the periodic table of
elements and the stability of atoms, and hence of all matter.

Relativity and geometry

The radical new idea of the quantum physics of atoms and light marked one
direction of departure from the comforting sureness of 19th century classical field
theory. The other big surprise of the 20th century came with the astounding
observation in an experiment by Michelson and Morley that the speed of light was
independent of the motion of the observer.

Now normally one would think that is a person were capable of throwing a
javelin at 5 miles per hour while standing still, that same person, when running
across the ground at 10 miles per hour, would be capable of making the javelin
travel across the ground at a speed of 15 miles per hour.

But according to the data from the Michelson-Morley experiment, if one uses a
laser instead of a javelin, then whether the person is sanding still or running 60
miles per hour or in a rocket traveling near the speed of light -- the light from the
laser still travels the same speed!

This was an astounding result! How could it be explained using physics?

Einstein came up with a powerful, simple theory, called the Special Theory of
Relativity. Einstein used the geometric notion of a metric. The most familiar
metric is just the Pythagorean Rule, which in three space dimensions in
differential form looks like

This formula has the special property that it is invariant under rotations. In other
words, the length of a straight line does not change when you rotate the line in
space. In the Special Theory of Relativity the idea of a metric is extended to
include time, with a very crucial minus sign:

Like the space metric, the spacetime is invariant under rotations in space. But
now there is a new twist -- the spacetime metric is also invariant under a kind of
rotation of space and time called a Lorentz transformation, and this
transformation tells us how different observers who are moving with some
constant velocity relative to one another see the world.

And under a Lorentz transformation, the speed of light always stays the same,
which is consistent with the shocking Michelson-Morley experiment.

Einstein's next target of revision was Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation. In

Newton's formula the gravitational force F12 between two planets of masses m1
and m2 as depending on the inverse square of the distance r12 between the
planets
GN is called Newton's constant and is measured to be 6.7x10-8 cm3 /(gm sec2)

Newton's Law was extremely successful at explaining the observed motions of

the planets around the Sun, and of the moon around the Earth, and easily
extendible through the techniques of classical field theory to continuous systems.

However, there was no hint in Newton's theory as to how a gravitational field

would change in time, especially not in a manner that was consistent with the
new understanding in Special Relativity that nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light.

Einstein took a very bold step, and reached out to some radical new
mathematics called non-Euclidean geometry, where the Pythagorean rule is
generalized to include metrics with coefficients that depend on the spacetime
coordinates in the form

where repeated indices imply a sum over all space and time directions in the
chosen coordinate system. Einstein extended the idea of Lorentz invariance to
general coordinate invariance, proposing that the values of physical observables
should be independent of a choice of coordinate system used to chart points in
spacetime. He called this new theory the General Theory of Relativity.
In Einstein's new theory, spacetime can have curvature, like the surface of a
beach ball has curvature, compared to the flat top of a table, which doesn't. The
curvature is a function of the metric gab and its first and second derivatives. In
the Einstein equation

the spacetime curvature (represented by Rmn and R) is determined by the total

energy and momentum Tmn of the "stuff" in the spacetime like the planets, stars,
radiation, interstellar dust and gas, black holes, etc.
The Einstein equation is not strictly a departure from classical field theory, and
the Einstein equation can be derived as the solution to Euler-Lagrange equations
that represent the stationary point, or extremum, of the action

Two views of the world

Using quantum mechanics, the typical questions that can be answered concern
the types of quantum states and allowed transitions in a system that features one
or more particles that has some type of potential energy represented by the
potential V(x). A typical method of working is to take some given V(x) and use
the Schrödinger equation find the wave function, the energies of the quantum
states of the system, and the allowed transitions between those states.
 In general relativity, things are very different. One performs calculations that
compute the evolution and structure of an entire universe at a time. A typical way
of working is to propose some particular collection of energy and matter in the
universe,to provide the Tmn. Given a particular Tmn, the Einstein equation turns
into a system of second order nonlinear differential equations whose solutions
give us the metric of spacetime, gmn, which holds all the information about the
structure and evolution of a universe with that given Tmn.
Given the difference in the fundamental questions and methodologies used in
quantum mechanics and in general relativity, it seems hardy surprising that
uniting quantum physics with gravity, for a theory of quantum gravity, would
prove to be a very tough challenge.

Relativistic quantum field theory has worked very well to describe the observed
behaviors and properties of elementary particles. But the theory itself only works
well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works
when we pretend gravity doesn't exist.

General relativity has yielded a wealth of insight into the Universe, the orbits of
planets, the evolution of stars and galaxies, the Big Bang and recently observed
black holes and gravitational lenses. However, the theory itself only works when
we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is
not needed in our description of Nature.

String theory is believed to close this gap.

Originally, string theory was proposed as an explanation for the observed

relationship between mass and spin for certain particles called hadrons, which
include the proton and neutron. Things didn't work out, though, and Quantum
Chromodynamics eventually proved a better theory for hadrons.

But particles in string theory arise as excitations of the string, and included in the
excitations of a string in string theory is a particle with zero mass and two
units of spin.

If there were a good quantum theory of gravity, then the particle that would carry
the gravitational force would have zero mass and two units of spin. This has
been known by theoretical physicists for a long time. This theorized particle is
called the graviton.

This led early string theorists to propose that string theory be applied not as a
theory of hadronic particles, but as a theory of quantum gravity, the unfulfilled
fantasy of theoretical physics in the particle and gravity communities for decades.

But it wasn't enough that there be a graviton predicted by string theory. One can
add a graviton to quantum field theory by hand, but the calculations that are
supposed to describe Nature become useless. This is because, as illustrated in the
diagram above, particle interactions occur at a single point of spacetime, at zero
distance between the interacting particles. For gravitons, the mathematics
behaves so badly at zero distance that the answers just don't make sense. In
string theory, the strings collide over a small but finite distance, and the answers
do make sense.

This doesn't mean that string theory is not without its deficiencies. But the zero
distance behavior is such that we can combine quantum mechanics and
gravity, and we can talk sensibly about a string excitation that carries the
gravitational force.

This was a very great hurdle that was overcome for late 20th century physics,
which is why so many young people are willing to learn the grueling complex and
abstract mathematics that is necessary to study a quantum theory of interacting
strings.

Once special relativity was on firm observational and theoretical footing, it was
appreciated that the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics was not Lorentz
invariant, therefore quantum mechanics as it was so successfully developed in the
1920s was not a reliable description of nature when the system contained
particles that would move at or near the speed of light.

The problem is that the Schrödinger equation is first order in time derivatives
but second order in spatial derivatives. The Klein-Gordon equation is second order
in both time and space and has solutions representing particles with spin 0:

Dirac came up with "square root" of Klein-Gordon equation using matrices called
"gamma matrices", and the solutions turned out to be particles of spin 1/2:

where the matrix hmn is the metric of flat spacetime. But the problem with
relativistic quantum mechanics is that the solutions of the Dirac and Klein-Gordon
equation have instabilities that turn out to represent the creation and annihilation
of virtual particles from essentially empty space.

Further understanding led to the development of relativistic quantum field

theory, beginning with quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short, pioneered by
Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga in the 1940s. In quantum field theory, the
behaviors and properties of elementary particles can calculated using a series of
diagrams, called Feynman diagrams, that properly account for the creation and
annihilation of virtual particles.

The set of the Feynman diagrams for the scattering of two electrons looks like
 + + + ...

The straight black lines represent electrons. The green wavy line represents a
photon, or in classical terms, the electromagnetic field between the two electrons
that makes them repel one another. Each small black loop represents a photon
creating an electron and a positron, which then annihilate one another and
produce a photon, in what is called a virtual process. The full scattering amplitude
is the sum of all contributions from all possible loops of photons, electrons,
positrons, and other available particles.

The quantum loop calculation comes with a very big problem. In order to
properly account for all virtual processes in the loops, one must integrate over all
possible values of momentum, from zero momentum to infinite momentum. But
these loop integrals for an particle of spin J in D dimensions take the approximate
form

If the quantity 4J + D - 8 is negative, then the integral behaves fine for infinite
momentum (or zero wavelength, by the de Broglie relation.) If this quantity is
zero or positive, then the integral takes an infinite value, and the whole theory
threatens to make no sense because the calculations just give infinite answers.

The world that we see has D=4, and the photon has spin J=1. So for the case
of electron-electron scattering, these loop integrals can still take infinite values.
But the integrals go to infinity very slowly, like the logarithm of momentum, and
it turns out that in this case, the theory can be renormalized so that the infinities
can be absorbed into a redefinition of a small number of parameters in the
theory, such as the mass and charge of the electron.

Quantum electrodynamics was a renormalizable theory, and by the 19402, this

was regarded as a solved relativistic quantum theory. But the other known
particle forces -- the weak nuclear force that makes radioactivity, the strong
nuclear force that hold neurons and protons together, and the gravitational force
that holds us on the earth -- weren't so quickly conquered by theoretical physics.

In the 1960s, particle physicists reached towards something called a dual

resonance model in an attempt to describe the strong nuclear force. The dual
model was never that successful at describing particles, but it was understood by
1970 that the dual models were actually quantum theories of relativistic vibrating
strings and displayed very intriguing mathematical behavior. Dual models came
to be called string theory as a result.

But in 1971, a new type of quantum field theory came on the scene that
explained the weak nuclear force by uniting it with electromagnetism into
electroweak theory, and it was shown to be renormalizable. Then similar wisdom
was applied to the strong nuclear force to yield quantum chromodynamics, or
QCD, and this theory was also renormalizable.

Which left one force -- gravity -- that couldn't be turned into a renormalizable
field theory no matter how hard anyone tried. One big problem was that classical
gravitational waves carry spin J=2, so one should assume that a graviton, the
quantum particle that carries the gravitational force, has spin J=2. But for J=2, 4
J - 8 + D = D, and so for D=4, the loop integral for the gravitational force would
become infinite like the fourth power of momentum, as the momentum in the
loop became infinite.

And that was just hard cheese for particle physicists, and for many years the
best people worked on quantum gravity to no avail.

But the string theory that was once proposed for the strong interactions
contained a massless particle with spin J=2.

In 1974 the question finally was asked: could string theory be a theory of
quantum gravity?

The possible advantage of string theory is that the analog of a Feynman

diagram in string theory is a two-dimensional smooth surface, and the loop
integrals over such a smooth surface lack the zero-distance, infinite momentum
problems of the integrals over particle loops.

In string theory infinite momentum does not even mean zero distance,
because for strings, the relationship between distance and momentum is roughly
like

The parameter a' (pronounced alpha prime) is related to the string tension, the
fundamental parameter of string theory, by the relation

The above relation implies a minimum observable length for a quantum string
theory of

The zero-distance behavior which is so problematic in quantum field theory

becomes irrelevant in string theories, and this makes string theory very attractive
as a theory of quantum gravity. If string theory is a theory of quantum gravity,
then this minimum length scale should be at least the size of the Planck length,
which is the length scale made by the combination of Newton's constant, the
speed of light and Planck's constant
although as we shall see later, the question of length scales in string theory is
complicated by string duality, which can relate two theories with seemingly
different length scales.

Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension
across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension
is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These
musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under
tension.

In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in

particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation
modes of elementary strings.

In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension
in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in
spacetime, they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The
string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), where a' is
pronounced "alpha prime"and is equal to the square of the string length scale.

If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a

string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called the
Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a
billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Unfortunately, this means that
strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics
technology (or financing!!) and so string theorists must devise more clever
methods to test the theory than just looking for little strings in particle
experiments.

String theories are classified according to whether or not the strings are required
to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. In
order to include fermions in string theory, there must be a special kind of
symmetry called supersymmetry, which means for every boson (particle that
transmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up
matter). So supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the
particles that make up matter.

Supersymmetric partners to to currently known particles have not been observed

in particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric
particles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators. Particle
accelerators could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy
supersymmetry in the next decade. Evidence for supersymmetry at high energy
would be compelling evidence that string theory was a good mathematical model
for Nature at the smallest distance scales.

Pythagoras could be called the first known string theorist. Pythagoras, an

excellent lyre player, figured out the first known string physics -- the harmonic
relationship. Pythagoras realized that vibrating Lyre strings of equal tensions but
different lengths would produce harmonious notes (i.e. middle C and high C) if
the ratio of the lengths of the two strings were a whole number.

Pythagoras discovered this by looking and listening. Today that information is

more precisely encoded into mathematics, namely the wave equation for a string
with a tension T and a mass per unit length m. If the string is described in
coordinates as in the drawing below, where x is the distance along the string and
y is the height of the string, as the string oscillates in time t,

then the equation of motion is the one-dimensional wave equation

where vw is the wave velocity along the string.

When solving the equations of motion, we need to know the "boundary

conditions" of the string. Let's suppose that the string is fixed at each end and
has an unstretched length L. The general solution to this equation can be written
as a sum of "normal modes", here labeled by the integer n, such that

The condition for a normal mode is that the wavelength be some integral fraction
of twice the string length, or

The frequency of the normal mode is then

The normal modes are what we hear as notes. Notice that the string wave
velocity vw increases as the tension of the string is increased, and so the normal
frequency of the string increases as well. This is why a guitar string makes a
higher note when it is tightened.

But that's for a nonrelativistic string, one with a wave velocity much smaller
than the speed of light. How do we write the equation for a relativistic string?
 According to Einstein's theory, a relativistic equation has to use coordinates
that have the proper Lorentz transformation properties. But then we have a
problem, because a string oscillates in space and time, and as it oscillates, it
sweeps out a two-dimensional surface in spacetime that we call a world sheet
(compared with the world line of a particle).

In the nonrelativistic string, there was a clear difference between the space
coordinate along the string, and the time coordinate. But in a relativistic string
theory, we wind up having to consider the world sheet of the string as a two-
dimensional spacetime of its own, where the division between space and time
depends upon the observer.

The classical equation can be written as

where s and t are coordinates on the string world sheet representing space and
time along the string, and the parameter c2 is the ratio of the string tension to
the string mass per unit length.

These equations of motion can be derived from Euler-Lagrange equations from

an action based on the string world sheet

The spacetime coordinates Xm of the string in this picture are also fields Xm in a
two-dimension field theory defined on the surface that a string sweeps out as it
travels in space. The partial derivatives are with respect to the coordinates s and
t on the world sheet and hmn is the two-dimensional metric defined on the string
world sheet.

The general solution to the relativistic string equations of motion looks very
similar to the classical nonrelativistic case above. The transverse space
coordinates can be expanded in normal modes as

The string solution above is unlike a guitar string in that it isn't tied down at
either end and so travels freely through spacetime as it oscillates. The string
above is an open string, with ends that are floppy.

For a closed string, the boundary conditions are periodic, and the resulting
oscillating solution looks like two open string oscillations moving in the opposite
direction around the string. These two types of closed string modes are called
right-movers and left-movers, and this difference will be important later in the
supersymmetric heterotic string theory.
 This is classical string. When we add quantum mechanics by making the string
momentum and position obey quantum commutation relations, the oscillator
mode coefficients have the commutation relations

The quantized string oscillator modes wind up giving representations of the

Poincaré group, through which quantum states of mass and spin are classified in
a relativistic quantum field theory.

So this is where the elementary particle arise in string theory. Particles in a

string theory are like the harmonic notes played on a string with a fixed tension

The parameter a' is called the string parameter and the square root of this
number represents the approximate distance scale at which string effects should
become observable.

In the generic quantum string theory, there are quantum states with negative
norm, also known as ghosts. This happens because of the minus sign in the
spacetime metric, which implies that

So there ends up being extra unphysical states in the string spectrum.

In 26 spacetime dimensions, these extra unphysical states wind up

disappearing from the spectrum. Therefore. bosonic string quantum mechanics is
only consistent if the dimension of spacetime is 26.

By looking at the quantum mechanics of the relativistic string normal modes,

one can deduce that the quantum modes of the string look just like the particles
we see in spacetime, with mass that depends on the spin according to the
formula

Remember that boundary conditions are important for string behavior. Strings
can be open, with ends that travel at the speed of light, or closed, with their ends
joined in a ring.

One of the particle states of a closed string has zero mass and two units of
spin, the same mass and spin as a graviton, the particle that is supposed to be
the carrier of the gravitational force.
There are several ways theorists can build string theories. Start with the
elementary ingredient: a wiggling tiny string. Next decide: should it be an open
string or a closed string? Then ask: will I settle for only bosons ( particles that
transmit forces) or will I ask for fermions, too (particles that make up matter)?
(Remember that in string theory, a particle is like a note played on the string.)

If the answer to the last question is "Bosons only, please!" then one gets bosonic
string theory. If the answer is "No, I demand that matter exist!" then we wind
up needing supersymmetry, which means an equal matching between bosons
(particles that transmit forces) and fermions (particles that make up matter). A
supersymmetric string theory is called a superstring theory. There are five kinds
of superstring theories, shown in the table below.

The final question for making a string theory should be: can I do quantum
mechanics sensibly? For bosonic strings, this question is only answered in the
affirmative if the spacetime dimensions number 26. For superstrings we can
whittle it down to 10. How we get down to the four spacetime dimensions we
observe in our world is another story.

Type Spacetime Details

Dimensions
Bosonic 26 Only bosons, no fermions means only forces, no
matter, with both open and closed strings. Major
flaw: a particle with imaginary mass, called the
tachyon
I 10 10 Supersymmetry between forces and matter, with
both open and closed strings, no tachyon, group
symmetry is SO(32)
IIA 10 Supersymmetry between forces and matter, with
closed strings only, no tachyon, massless fermions
spin both ways (nonchiral)
IIB 10 Supersymmetry between forces and matter, with
closed strings only, no tachyon, massless fermions
only spin one way (chiral)
HO 10 Supersymmetry between forces and matter, with
closed strings only, no tachyon, heterotic, meaning
right moving and left moving strings differ, group
symmetry is SO(32)
HE 10 Supersymmetry between forces and matter, with
closed strings only, no tachyon, heterotic, meaning
right moving and left moving strings differ, group
symmetry is E8 x E8

If we ask how to get from ten space-time dimensions to four space-time

dimensions, then the number of string theories grows, because there are so
many possible ways to make six dimensions much much smaller than the other
four in string theory. This process of compactification of unwanted space-time
dimensions yields interesting physics on its own.

But the number of string theories has also been shrinking in recent years,
because string theorists are discovering that what they thought were completely
different theories were in fact different ways of looking at the same
theory!

This period in string history has been given the name the second string
revolution.

And now the biggest rush in string research is to collapse the table above into
one theory, which some people want to call M theory, for it is the Mother of
all theories.

Stay tuned to this web site, we may someday soon be changing the name to The
Official M Theory Web Site!

A new picture of string theory

At one time, string theorists believed there were five distinct superstring
theories: type I, types IIA and IIB, and the two heterotic string theories. The
thinking was that out of these five candidate theories, only one was the actual
correct Theory of Everything, and that theory was the theory whose low energy
limit, with ten dimensions spacetime compactified down to four, matched the
physics observed in our world today. The other theories would be nothing more
than rejected string theories, mathematical constructs not blessed by Nature with
existence.

But now it is known that this naive picture was wrong, and that the the five
superstring theories are connected to one another as if they are each a special
case of some more fundamental theory, of which there is only one. These
theories are related by transformations that are called dualities. If two theories
are related by a duality transformation, it means that the first theory can be
transformed in some way so that it ends up looking just like the second theory.
The two theories are then said to be dual to one another under that kind of
transformation.

These dualities link quantities that were also thought to be separate. Large and
small distance scales, strong and weak coupling strengths -- these quantities
have always marked very distinct limits of behavior of a physical system, in both
classical field theory and quantum particle physics. But strings can obscure the
difference between large and small, strong and weak, and this is how these five
very different theories end up being related.

Large and small distance

The duality symmetry that obscures our ability to distinguish between large
and small distance scales is called T-duality, and comes about from the
compactification of extra space dimensions in a ten dimensional superstring
theory.

Suppose we're in ten spacetime dimensions, which means we have nine space
and one time. Take one of those nine space dimensions and make it a circle of
radius R, so that traveling in that direction for a distance L=2pR takes you around
the circle and brings you back to where you started.
 A particle traveling around this circle will have a quantized momentum around
the circle, and this will contribute to the total energy of the particle. But a string
is very different, because in addition to traveling around the circle, the string can
wrap around the circle. The number of times the string winds around the circle is
called the winding number, and that is also quantized.

Now the weird thing about string theory is that these momentum modes and
the winding modes can be interchanged, as long as we also interchange the
radius R of the circle with the quantity Lst2/R, where Lst is the string length.

If R is very much smaller than the string length, then the quantity Lst2/R is
going to be very large. So exchanging momentum and winding modes of the
string exchanges a large distance scale with a small distance scale.

This type of duality is called T-duality. T-duality relates Type IIA superstring
theory to Type IIB superstring theory. That means if we take Type IIA and Type
IIB theory and compactify them both on a circle, then switching the momentum
and winding modes, and switching the distance scale, changes one theory into
the other! The same is also true for the two heterotic theories.

So T-duality obscures the difference between large and small distances. What
looks like a very large distance to a momentum mode of a string looks, looks to a
winding mode of a string like a very small distance. This is very counter to how
physics has always worked since the days of Kepler and Newton.

Strong and weak coupling

What is a coupling constant? This is some number that tells us how strong an
interaction is. Newton's constant is the coupling constant for the gravitational
force, for example. If Newton's constant were twice the size it is measured to be
now, then we would feel twice as much gravitational force from the Earth, and
the Earth would feel twice as much from the Moon and the Sun, and so on. A
larger coupling constant means a stronger force, and a smaller coupling constant
means a weaker force.

Every force has a coupling constant. For electromagnetism, the coupling

constant is proportional to the square of the electric charge. When physicists
study the quantum behavior of electromagnetism, they can't solve the whole
theory exactly, so they break it down to little pieces, and each little piece that
they can solve has a different power of the coupling constant in front of it. At
normal energies in electromagnetism, the coupling constant is small, and so the
first few little pieces make a good approximation to the real answer. But if the
coupling constant gets large, that method of calculation breaks down, and the
little pieces become worthless as an approximation to the real physics.

This also can happen in string theory. String theories have a coupling constant.
But unlike in particle theories, the string coupling constant is not just a number,
but depends on one of the oscillation modes of the string, called the dilaton.
Exchanging the dilaton field with minus itself exchanges a very large coupling
constant with a very small one.

This symmetry is called S-duality. If two string theories are related by S-

duality, then one theory with a strong coupling constant is the same as the other
theory with weak coupling constant. Notice that the theory with strong coupling
cannot be understood by means of expanding in a series, but the theory with
weak coupling can. So if the two theories are related by S-duality, then we just
need to understand the weak theory, and that is equivalent to understanding the
strong theory. For a physicist, that is the proverbial two-for-one deal!

Superstring theories related by S-duality are: Type I superstring theory with

heterotic SO(32) superstring theory, and Type IIB theory with itself.

What does it mean?

T-duality is something unique to string physics. It's something particles cannot

do, because a particle cannot get wrapped around a circle like a string. If string
theory is a correct theory of Nature, then this implies that one some deep level,
the separation between large vs. small distance scales in physics is not a fixed
separation but a fluid one, dependent upon the type of probe we use to measure
distance, and how we count the states of the probe.

The same goes for S-duality, which teaches us that the strong coupling limit of
one string theory can describe the weak coupling limit of a different string theory.

This sounds like it goes against all traditional physics, but this is indeed a
reasonable outcome for a quantum theory of gravity, because Einstein's theory of
gravity tells us that gravity is about how the sizes of objects and magnitudes of
interactions are measured in curved spacetime.

A new picture of string theory

At one time, string theorists believed there were five distinct superstring
theories: type I, types IIA and IIB, and heterotic SO(32) and E8XE8 string
theories. The thinking was that out of these five candidate theories, only one was
the actual correct Theory of Everything, and that theory was the theory whose
low energy limit, with ten dimensions spacetime compactified down to four,
matched the physics observed in our world today. The other theories would be
nothing more than rejected string theories, mathematical constructs not blessed
by Nature with existence.

But now it is known that this naive picture was wrong, and that the the five
superstring theories are connected to one another as if they are each a special
case of some more fundamental theory, of which there is only one. In the mid-
nineties it was learned that superstring theories are related by duality
transformations known as T duality and S duality. These dualities link the
quantities of large and small distance, and strong and weak coupling, limits that
have always been identified as distinct limits of a physical system in both classical
and quantum physics. These duality relationships between string theories have
sparked a radical shift in our understanding of string theory, and have led to the
reasonable expectation that all five superstring theories -- type I, types IIA and
IIB, and heterotic SO(32) and E8XE8 -- are special limits of a more fundamental
theory.

T duality

The duality symmetry that obscures our ability to distinguish between large
and small distance scales is called T-duality, and comes about from the
compactification of extra space dimensions in a ten dimensional superstring
theory. Let's take the X9 direction in flat ten-dimensional spacetime, and
compactify it into a circle of radius R, so that
 A particle traveling around this circle will have its momentum quantized in
integer multiples of 1/R, and a particle in the nth quantized momentum state will
contribute to the total mass squared of the particle as

A string can travel around the circle, too, and the contribution to the string mass
squared is the same as above.

But a closed string can also wrap around the circle, something a particle
cannot do. The number of times the string winds around the circle is called the
winding number, denoted as w below, and w is also quantized in integer units.
Tension is energy per unit length, and the the wrapped string has energy from
being stretched around the circular dimension. The winding contribution Ew to the
string energy is equal to the string tension Tstring times the total length of the
wrapped string, which is the circumference of the circle multiplied by the number
of times w that the string is wrapped around the circle.

where

tells us the length scale Ls of string theory.

The total mass squared for each mode of the closed string is

The integers N and Ñ are the number of oscillation modes excited on a closed
string in the right-moving and left-moving directions around the string.

The above formula is invariant under the exchange

In other words, we can exchange compactification radius R with radius a'/R if we

exchange the winding modes with the quantized momentum modes.

This mode exchange is the basis of the duality known as T-duality. Notice that
if the compactification radius R is much smaller than the string scale Ls, then the
compactification radius after the winding and momentum modes are exchanged is
much larger than the string scale Ls. So T-duality obscures the difference between
compactified dimensions that are much bigger than the string scale, and those
that are much smaller than the string scale.

T-duality relates type IIA superstring theory to type IIB superstring theory, and
it relates heterotic SO(32) superstring theory to heterotic E8XE8 superstring
theory. Notice that a duality relationship between IIA and IIB theory is very
unexpected, because type IIA theory has massless fermions of both chiralities,
making it a non-chiral theory, whereas type IIB theory is a chiral theory and has
massless fermions with only a single chirality.

T-duality is something unique to string physics. It's something point particles

cannot do, because they don't have winding modes. If string theory is a correct
theory of Nature, then this implies that on some deep level, the separation
between large vs. small distance scales in physics is not a fixed separation but a
fluid one, dependent upon the type of probe we use to measure distance, and
how we count the states of the probe.

This sounds like it goes against all traditional physics, but this is indeed a
reasonable outcome for a quantum theory of gravity, because gravity comes from
the metric tensor field that tells us the distances between events in spacetime.

Strong and weak coupling

What is a coupling constant? This is some number that tells us how strong an
interaction is. Newton's constant GN, which appears in both Newton's law of
gravity and the Einstein equation, is the coupling constant for gravitational
interactions. For electromagnetism, the coupling constant is related to the electric
charge through the fine structure constant a

In both particle physics and string theory, usually the scattering amplitudes
and other quantities have to be computed as an expansion in powers of the
coupling constant or loop expansion parameter, which we've called g2 below:

At low energies in electromagnetism, the dimensionless coupling constant a is

very small compared to unity, and the higher powers in a become too small to
matter. The first few terms in the series make a good approximation to the real
answer, which often can't be calculated at all because the mathematical
technology doesn't exist to solve the whole theory at once.

If the coupling constant gets very large compared to unity, perturbation theory
becomes useless, because higher powers of the expansion parameter are bigger,
not smaller, than lower powers. This is called a strongly coupled theory. Coupling
constants in quantum field theory end up depending on energy because of
quantum vacuum effects. A quantum field theory can be weakly coupled at low
energies and strongly coupled at high energies, as is true with the fine structure
constant a in QED, or strongly coupled at low energies and weakly coupled at
high energies, as is true with the coupling constant for quark and gluon
interactions in QCD.

Some quantities in a theory cannot be caluclated at all using perturbation

theory, espcially not for weak coupling. For example, the amplitude below cannot
be expanded around the value g2=0

because the amplitude is singular there. This is typical of a tunneling transition,

which is forbidden by energy conservation in classical physics and hence has no
expansion around a classical limit.

String theories feature two kinds of perturbative expansions: an expansion in

powers of the string parameter a' in the conformal field theory on the two-
dimensional string worldsheet, and a quantum loop expansion for string
scattering amplitudes in d-dimensional spacetime. But unlike in particle theories,
the string quantum loop expansion parameter is not just a number, but depends
on one of the dynamic modes of the string, called the dilaton field f(x)

This relationship between the dilaton and the string loop expansion parameter
is important in understanding the duality relation known as S-duality. S-duality
can be examined most easily in type IIB string theory, because this theory
happens to be S-dual to itself. The low energy limit of type IIB theory (meaning
the lowest nontrivial order in the string parameter a') is a type IIB supergavity
field theory, which features a complex scalar field r(x) whose real part is the
axion field c(x) and whose imaginary part is the exponential of the dilaton field
f(x):

This field theory is invariant under a global transformation by the group SL(2,R)
(broken by quantum effects down to SL(2,Z)), with the field r(x) transforming as

If there is no contribution from the axion field, then the expectation value of
the field r(x) is given by the dilaton alone. Because the dilaton is identified with
gst, the SL(2,Z) transformation with b=-1,c=1

tells us that the theory at coupling gst is the same as the theory at coupling 1/gst!
 This transformation is called S-duality. If two string theories are related by S-
duality, then one theory with a strong coupling constant is the same as the other
theory with weak coupling constant. Type IIB superstring theory is S-dual to
itself, so the strong and weak coupling limits are the same. This duality allows an
understanding of the strong coupling limit of the theory that would not be
possible by any other means.

Something more surprising is that type I superstring theory is S-dual to

heterotic SO(32) superstring theory. This is surprising because type I theories
contain open and closed strings, where as heterotic theories contain only open
strings. What's the explanation? At very strong coupling, heterotic SO(32) string
theory has excitations that are open strings, but these open strings are highly
unstable in the weakly coupled limit of the theory, which is the limit in which
heterotic string theory is commonly understood.

More than just strings

Another surprising revelation was that superstring theories are not just
theories of one-dimensional objects. There are higher dimensional objects in
string theory with dimensions from zero (points) to nine, called p-branes. In
terms of branes, what we usually call a membrane would be a two-brane, a string
is called a one-brane and a point is called a zero-brane.

What makes a p-brane? A p-brane is a spacetime object that is a solution to

the Einstein equation in the low energy limit of superstring theory, with the
energy density of the nongravitational fields confined to some p-dimensional
subspace of the nine space dimensions in the theory. (Remember, superstring
theory lives in ten spacetime dimensions, which means one time dimension plus
nine space dimensions.) For example, in a solution with electric charge, if the
energy density in the electromagnetic field was distributed along a line in
spacetime, this one-dimensional line would be considered a p-brane with p=1.

A special class of p-branes in string theory are called D branes. Roughly

speaking, a D brane is a p-brane where the ends of open strings are localized on
the brane. A D brane is like a collective excitation of strings.

These objects took a long time to be discovered in string theory, because they
are buried deep in the mathematics of T-duality. D branes are important in
understanding black holes in string theory, especially in counting the quantum
states that lead to black hole entropy, which was a very big accomplishment for
string theory.

How many dimensions?

Before string theory won the full attention of the theoretical physics
community, the most popular unified theory was an eleven dimensional theory of
supergravity, which is supersymmetry combined with gravity. The eleven-
dimensional spacetime was to be compactified on a small 7-dimensional sphere,
for example, leaving four spacetime dimensions visible to observers at large
distances.

This theory didn't work as a unified theory of particle physics, because it

doesn't have a sensible quantum limit as a point particle theory. But this eleven
dimensional theory would not die. It eventually came back to life in the strong
coupling limit of superstring theory in ten dimensions.

How could a superstring theory with ten spacetime dimensions turn into a
supergravity theory with eleven spacetime dimensions? We've already learned
that duality relations between superstring theories relate very different theories,
equate large distance with small distance, and exchange strong coupling with
weak coupling. So there must be some duality relation that can explain how a
superstring theory that requires ten spacetime dimensions for quantum
consistency can really be a theory in eleven spacetime dimensions after all.

Since we know that all string theories are related, and we suspect that they
are but different limits of some more fundamental theory, then perhaps that more
fundamental theory exists in eleven spacetime dimensions? These question bring
us to the topic of M theory.

The theory currently known as M

Technically speaking, M theory is is the unknown eleven-dimensional theory

whose low energy limit is the supergravity theory in eleven dimensions discussed
above. However, many people have taken to also using M theory to label the
unknown theory believed to be the fundamental theory from which the known
superstring theories emerge as special limits.

We still don't know the fundamental M theory, but a lot has been learned
about the eleven-dimensional M theory and how it relates to superstrings in ten
spacetime dimensions.

In M theory, there are also extended objects, but they are called M branes
rather than D branes. One class of the M branes in this theory has two space
dimensions, and this is called an M2 brane.

Now consider M theory with the tenth space dimension compactified into a
circle of radius R. If one of the two space dimensions that make up the M2 brane
is wound around that circle, then we can equate the resulting object with the
fundamental string (one-brane) of type IIA superstring theory. The type IIA
theory appears to be a ten dimensional theory in the normal perturbative limit,
but reveals an extra space dimension, and an equivalence to M theory, in the
limit of very strong coupling.

We still don't know what the fundamental theory behind string theory is, but
judging from all of these relationships, it must be a very interesting and rich
theory, one where distance scales, coupling strengths and even the number of
dimensions in spacetime are not fixed concepts but fluid entities that shift with
our point of view.

More than just strings

 To understand the presence of objects in string theory that are not strings, but
higher dimensional objects, or even points, it helps to know the formulation of
Maxwell's equations in the language of differential forms, because this is what
tells us that the sources of charge in the Maxwell equations are zero-dimensional
objects. Gauge field strengths that are p+2-forms turn out to have sources that
are p-dimensional objects. We call these p-branes.

In the regular maxwell equations in d=4 spacetime dimension, the electric and
magentic fields are packed together into the field strength F, which satisfies the
equation F=dA, d is the exterior derivative, and A is the vector potential, a one-
form. The two-form *F is the dual of F relative to the spacetime volume four-form
v. (The subscripts on F, etc, below are just to indicate the degree of the
differential form.)

The charge sources enter through the equation d*F=*J, where *J is the three-
form dual to the current four-vector J=(r,j). In the rest frame of the charge
density r, J=(r,0), so *J is r times the the volume element for three-dimensional
space. In a three-dimensional space, a surface that can be localized in three
dimensions (has codimension three) must be a zero-dimensional surface, also
known as a point.

This is the math that tells us that the Maxwell equations couple electrically to
sources that are points, or zero-branes, as zero-dimensional objects are now
called in string theory. (For magnetic couplings, the roles of F and *F are
interchanged, but that won't be covered here.) This same math works for two-
forms in any spacetime dimension, so we know that Maxwell's equations couple
to point charges in any spacetime dimension.

Superstring theories contain electromagnetism, but they also contain field

strengths that are three-forms, four-forms and on up. These field strengths obey
equations just like the Maxwell equations, and their sources can be analyzed in
the same manner as above.

Suppose we start in d spacetime dimensions with a vector potential A that is a

p+1-form. Then F is a p+2-form, v is a d-form (because it's the volume element
of d-dimensional spacetime), *F is a (d-p-2)-form, and d*F is a (d-p-1)-form.
(Once again, the subscripts are just to indicate the degree of the differential
form.)
 The equations of motion tell us that the source term *J is also a (d-p-1)-form.
In the rest frame of an isolated source, *J is proportional to a volume element of
a (d-1-p)-dimensional subspace of (d-1)-dimensional space. The codimension of
the source is therefore (d-p-1), and since space has dimension d-1, the charges
that serve as sources must be objects with p dimensions, known as p-branes. So
a (p+2)-form field strength couples to sources that are p-branes. This little fact
has turned out to be extremely important in string theory.

Superstring theories are theories with gravity, so these p-dimensional

localizations of charge must lead to spacetime curvature. A p-brane spacetime
whose metric solves the equations of motion for a (p+2)-form field strength in d
spacetime dimensions can be described using p space coordinates {yi} along the
p-brane and (d-1-p) space coordinates {xa} orthogonal to the p-brane.

The isometries of this spacetime consist of translations (shifting the coordinate by

a constant) and Lorentz transformations in the (p+1)-dimensional worldvolume,
plus spatial rotations in the (d-1-p)-dimensional space orthogonal to the p-brane.

There's a problem with adding gravity, however. Most p-brane spacetimes turn
out to be unstable. Supersymmetry stabilizes p-branes, but only for the certain
values of p and d. Two of the most important p-branes in string theory are the
two-brane in d=11 and the five-brane in d=10.

Since we're talking about a spacetime metric, we're obviously in the low
energy limit of string theory. But p-branes can be protected from quantum
corrections by supersymmetry, if they satisfy an equality between mass and
charge known as the BPS condition. These branes are then known as BPS branes.

From p-branes to D-branes

A special class of p-branes in string theory are called D branes. Roughly

speaking, a D brane is a p-brane where the ends of open strings are localized on
the brane.

D-branes were discovered by investigating T-duality for open strings. Open

strings don't have winding modes around compact dimensions, so one might
think that open strings behave like particles in the presence of circular
dimensions. However, the stringiness of open strings in the presence of compact
dimensions exhibits itself in a more subtle manner, and the T-dual of an open
string theory is anything but uninteresting.

The normal open string boundary conditions in the string oscillator expansion
comes from the requirement that there be no momentum exiting or entering
through the ends of an open string. This translates into what are called Neumann
boundary conditions at the ends of the string at (s=0) and (s=p):

Suppose d-1-p of the space dimensions are compactified on a torus with radius R,
and p of the space dimensions are left noncompact as before. In the T-dual of
this string theory, the boundary conditions in those d-1-p directions are changed
from Neumann to Dirichlet boundary conditions

This T-dual theory has strings with ends localized in d-1-p directions. So the T-
dual of open strings compactified on a torus of radius R is open strings with their
ends fixed to static p-branes, which we then call D-branes.

D branes have been very important in understanding string theory in general

(see below) but also of crucial importance in understanding black holes in string
theory, especially in counting the quantum states that lead to black hole entropy.

How many dimensions?

Before string theory won the full attention of the theoretical physics
community, the most popular unified theory was an eleven dimensional theory of
supergravity, which is supersymmetry combined with gravity. The eleven-
dimensional spacetime was to be compactified on a small 7-dimensional sphere,
leaving four spacetime dimensions visible to observers at large distances.

This theory didn't work as a unified theory of particle physics, because an

eleven-dimensional quantum field theory theory based on point particles is not
renormalizable. Also, chiral fermions cannot be defined in spacetimes with an odd
number of dimensions. But this eleven dimensional theory would not die. It
eventually came back to life in the strong coupling limit of superstring theory in
ten dimensions.

The theory currently known as M

Technically speaking, M theory is the unknown eleven-dimensional theory

whose low energy limit is the supergravity theory in eleven dimensions discussed
above. However, many people have taken to also using M theory to label the
unknown theory believed to be the fundamental theory from which the known
superstring theories emerge as special limits.
 We still don't know the fundamental M theory, but a lot has been learned
about the eleven-dimensional M theory and how it relates to superstrings in ten
spacetime dimensions.

Recall that one of the p-brane spacetimes that are stabilized by

supersymmetry is a two-brane in eleven spacetime dimensions. This object is
called the M2 brane for short.

Type IIA superstring theory has a stable one-brane solution called the
fundamental string. If we take M theory with the tenth space dimension
compactified into a circle of radius R, and wrap one of the dimensions of the M2
brane around that circle, then the result is the fundamental string of the type IIA
theory. When the M2 brane is not around that circle, then the result is the two-
dimensional D-brane, the D2 brane, of the type IIA theory.

If the two theories are identified, the type IIA coupling constant turns out to be
proportional to the radius R of the compactified tenth dimension in the M theory.
So the weakly coupled limit of type IIA superstring theory, which is the usual ten-
dimensional theory, is also an expansion around small R. The strong coupling
limit of type IIA theory is where R becomes very large, and the extra dimension
of spacetime is revealed. So type IIA superstring theory lives in ten spacetime
dimensions in the weak coupling limit, but eleven spacetime dimensions in the
strongly coupled limit.

We still don't know what the fundamental theory behind string theory is, but
judging from all of these relationships, it must be a very interesting and rich
theory, one where distance scales, coupling strengths and even the number of
dimensions in spacetime are not fixed concepts but fluid entities that shift with
our point of view.

MATHEMATICS
The language of physics is mathematics. In order to study
physics seriously, one needs to learn mathematics that took
generations of brilliant people centuries to work out.
Algebra, for example, was cutting-edge mathematics when
it was being developed in Baghdad in the 9th century. But
today it's just the first step along the journey.
Algebra
Algebra provides the first exposure to the use of variables
and constants, and experience manipulating and solving
linear equations of the form y = ax + b and quadratic
equations of the form y = ax2+bx+c.
Geometry
Geometry at this level is two-dimensional Euclidean
geometry, Courses focus on learning to reason
geometrically, to use concepts like symmetry, similarity
and congruence, to understand the properties of geometric
shapes in a flat, two-dimensional space.
Trigonometry
 Trigonometry begins with the study of right triangles and
the Pythagorean theorem. The trigonometric functions sin,
cos, tan and their inverses are introduced and clever
identities between them are explored.
Calculus (single variable)
Calculus begins with the definition of an abstract functions
of a single variable, and introduces the ordinary derivative
of that function as the tangent to that curve at a given
point along the curve. Integration is derived from looking
at the area under a curve,which is then shown to be the
inverse of differentiation.
Calculus (multivariable)
Multivariable calculus introduces functions of several
variables f(x,y,z...), and students learn to take partial and
total derivatives. The ideas of directional derivative,
integration along a path and integration over a surface are
developed in two and three dimensional Euclidean space.
Analytic Geometry
Analytic geometry is the marriage of algebra with
geometry. Geometric objects such as conic sections, planes
and spheres are studied by the means of algebraic
equations. Vectors in Cartesian, polar and spherical
coordinates are introduced.
Linear Algebra
In linear algebra, students learn to solve systems of linear
equations of the form ai1 x1 + ai2 x2 + ... + ain xn = ci and
express them in terms of matrices and vectors. The
properties of abstract matrices, such as inverse,
determinant, characteristic equation, and of certain types
of matrices, such as symmetric, antisymmetric, unitary or
Hermitian, are explored.
Ordinary Differential Equations
This is where the physics begins! Much of physics is about
deriving and solving differential equations. The most
important differential equation to learn, and the one most
studied in undergraduate physics, is the harmonic oscillator
equation, ax'' + bx' + cx = f(t), where x' means the time
derivative of x(t).
Partial Differential Equations
For doing physics in more than one dimension, it becomes
necessary to use partial derivatives and hence partial
differential equations. The first partial differential equations
students learn are the linear, separable ones that were
derived and solved in the 18th and 19th centuries by
people like Laplace, Green, Fourier, Legendre, and Bessel.
Methods of approximation
Most of the problems in physics can't be solved exactly in
closed form. Therefore we have to learn technology for
making clever approximations, such as power series
expansions, saddle point integration, and small (or large)
perturbations.
Probability and statistics
Probability became of major importance in physics when
quantum mechanics entered the scene. A course on
probability begins by studying coin flips, and the counting
of distinguishable vs. indistinguishable objects. The
 concepts of mean and variance are developed and applied
in the cases of Poisson and Gaussian statistics.

Here are some of the topics in mathematics that a person

who wants to learn advanced topics in theoretical physics,
especially string theory, should become familiar with.
Real analysis
In real analysis, students learn abstract properties of real
functions as mappings, isomorphism, fixed points, and
basic topology such as sets, neighborhoods, invariants
and homeomorphisms.
Complex analysis
Complex analysis is an important foundation for learning
string theory. Functions of a complex variable, complex
manifolds, holomorphic functions, harmonic forms, Kähler
manifolds, Riemann surfaces and Teichmuller spaces are
topics one needs to become familiar with in order to
study string theory.
Group theory
Modern particle physics could not have progressed
without an understanding of symmetries and group
transformations. Group theory usually begins with the
group of permutations on N objects, and other finite
groups. Concepts such as representations, irreducibility,
classes and characters.
Differential geometry
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity turned non-
Euclidean geometry from a controversial advance in
mathematics into a component of graduate physics
education. Differential geometry begins with the study of
differentiable manifolds, coordinate systems, vectors and
tensors. Students should learn about metrics and
covariant derivatives, and how to calculate curvature in
coordinate and non-coordinate bases.
Lie groups
A Lie group is a group defined as a set of mappings on a
differentiable manifold. Lie groups have been especially
important in modern physics. The study of Lie groups
combines techniques from group theory and basic
differential geometry to develop the concepts of Lie
derivatives, Killing vectors, Lie algebras and matrix
representations.
Differential forms
The mathematics of differential forms, developed by Elie
Cartan at the beginning of the 20th century, has been
powerful technology for understanding Hamiltonian
dynamics, relativity and gauge field theory. Students
begin with antisymmetric tensors, then develop the
concepts of exterior product, exterior derivative,
orientability, volume elements, and integrability
conditions.
Homology
Homology concerns regions and boundaries of spaces.
 For example, the boundary of a two-dimensional circular
disk is a one-dimensional circle. But a one-dimensional
circle has no edges, and hence no boundary. In homology
this case is generalized to "The boundary of a boundary is
zero." Students learn about simplexes, complexes,
chains, and homology groups.
Cohomology
Cohomology and homology are related, as one might
suspect from the names. Cohomology is the study of the
relationship between closed and exact differential forms
defined on some manifold M. Students explore the
generalization of Stokes' theorem, de Rham cohomology,
the de Rahm complex, de Rahm's theorem and
cohomology groups.
Homotopy
Lightly speaking, homotopy is the study of the hole in the
donut. Homotopy is important in string theory because
closed strings can wind around donut holes and get
stuck, with physical consequences. Students learn about
paths and loops, homotopic maps of loops, contractibility,
the fundamental group, higher homotopy groups, and the
Bott periodicity theorem.
Fiber bundles
Fiber bundles comprise an area of mathematics that
studies spaces defined on other spaces through the use
of a projection map of some kind. For example, in
electromagnetism there is a U(1) vector potential
associated with every point of the spacetime manifold.
Therefore one could study electromagnetism abstractly as
a U(1) fiber bundle over some spacetime manifold M.
Concepts developed include tangent bundles, principal
bundles, Hopf maps, covariant derivatives, curvature,
and the connection to gauge field theories in physics.
Characteristic classes
The subject of characteristic classes applies cohomology
to fiber bundles to understand the barriers to untwisting
a fiber bundle into what is known as a trivial bundle. This
is useful because it can reduce complex physical
problems to math problems that are already solved. The
Chern class is particularly relevant to string theory.
Index theorems
In physics we are often interested in knowing about the
space of zero eigenvalues of a differential operator. The
index of such an operator is related to the dimension of
that space of zero eigenvalues. The subject of index
theorems and characteristic classes is concerned with
Supersymmetry and supergravity
The mathematics behind supersymmetry starts with two
concepts: graded Lie algebras, and Grassmann numbers.
A graded algebra is one that uses both commutation and
anti-commutation relations. Grassmann numbers are
anti-commuting numbers, so that x times y = –y times x.
The mathematical technology needed to work in
supersymmetry includes an understanding of graded Lie
algebras, spinors in arbitrary spacetime dimensions,
covariant derivatives of spinors, torsion, Killing spinors,
 and Grassmann multiplication, derivation and integration,
and Kähler potentials.

These are topics in mathematics at the current cutting edge

of superstring research.
K-theory
Cohomology is a powerful mathematical technology for
classifying differential forms. In the 1960s, work by Sir
Michael Atiyah, Isadore Singer, Alexandre Grothendieck,
and Friedrich Hirzebruch generalized coholomogy from
differential forms to vector bundles, a subject that is now
known as K-theory.

Witten has argued that K-theory is relevant to string

theory for classifying D-brane charges. D-brane objects in
string theory carry a type of charge called Ramond-
Ramond charge. Ramond-Ramond fields are differential
forms, and their charges should be classifed by ordinary
cohomology. But gauge fields propagate on D-branes,
and gauge fields give rise to vector bundles. This
suggests that D-brane charge classification requires a
generalization of cohomology to vector bundles -- hence
K-theory.

Overview of K-theory Applied to Strings by Edward

Witten

D-branes and K-theory by Edward Witten

Noncommutative geometry (NCG for short)
Geometry was originally developed to describe
physical space that we can see and measure. After
modern mathematics was freed from Euclid's Fifth Axiom
by Gauss and Bolyai, Riemann added to modern
geometry the abstract notion of a manifold M with points
that are labeled by local coordinates that are real
numbers, with some metric tensor that determines an
extremal length between two points on the manifold.

Much of the progress in 20th century physics was in

applying this modern notion of geometry to spacetime, or
to quantum gauge field theory.

In the quest to develop a notion of quantum geometry,

as far back as 1947, people were trying to quantize
spacetime so that the coordinates would not be ordinary
real numbers, but somehow elevated to quantum
operators obeying some nontrivial quantum commutation
relations. Hence the term "noncommutative geometry,"
or NCG for short.

The current interest in NCG among physicists of the

21st century has been stimulated by work by French
mathematician Alain Connes.
Two Lectures on D-Geometry and Noncommutative
Geometry by Michael R. Douglas
Noncommutative Geometry and Matrix Theory:
Compactification on Tori by Alain Connes, Michael R.
Douglas, Albert Schwarz

String Theory and Noncommutative Geometry by Edward

Witten and Nathan Seiberg.

Non-commutative spaces in physics and mathematics by

Daniela Bigatti

Noncommutative Geometry for Pedestrians by [Link]

 EXPERIMENT

Bubble chamber tracks of charged particles

The photo above shows the tracks left in a bubble chamber by tiny electrically
charged subatomic particles as they travel through a special fluid that makes
bubbles in the presence of electric charge. The animated neutral particle, marked
N, represents a neutral elementary particle such as a neutrino colliding with one
of the nuclei of the atoms in the fluid, producing a cascade of charged particles
that then decay into other charged particles.

Particle physicists have to decode tracks like those above in order to deduce basic
information about the observed particles, such as the electric charge, particle
spin, mass, lepton number, baryon number, parity and other quantum numbers
that turn out to be useful in describing the elementary particle side of Nature.

Now here's a short lesson in the history of elementary particle observations,

which began with the discovery of the electron in 1895:

A Timeline of Particle Discoveries

1895 The electron is discovered, except electrons are called cathode

rays by their discoverer.
1896 X rays and other forms of radioactivity are observed
1899 Alpha particles are discovered, and later shown to be helium
nuclei consisting of two neutrons and two protons.
1911 Nuclear model of atom with heavy nucleus in the middle and light
electrons orbiting around it, is proposed, and becomes accepted.
1911 Electron charge measured in an oil drop experiment indicates that
all electrons carry the same electric charge.
 1932 The neutron directly observed in an experiment for first time.
1932 The positron, predicted by a theorist in 1928, is discovered.
1934 Radioactive nuclei produced in the laboratory.
1937 The muon, a charged lepton like the electron only heavier and
hence unstable, is discovered.
1947 Two charged pi mesons, with positive and negative charge, are
discovered.
1950 The neutral pi meson is discovered.
1953 The lambda baryon and K meson are discovered.
1956 The electron neutrino, predicted by theory in 1930, is confirmed
to exist.
1950s- Lots of baryons and mesons being discovered, and their properties
1960s occur in regular patterns that look as if baryons and mesons are
made of smaller building blocks. Physicists exhibit a tendency to
name new particles after letters in the Greek alphabet.
1961 The muon neutrino is discovered and shown to be a different
particle from the electron neutrino..
1963 Quark theory postulates that protons are made of smaller particles
that carry charges that come in thirds of the electron charge. The
three flavors of quarks are given names: up, down and strange.
1970s Deep inelastic scattering and other experiments reveal more of the
quark structure inside protons and other hadrons.
1974 A fourth flavor of quark, named charm, is detected in a newly
discovered meson called the J (aka the yor Psi).
1975 The tau lepton is discovered, making a triplet of charged leptons
with the electron and muon, leading to predictions of a tau
neutrino to accompany the electron neutrino and the muon
neutrino.
1979 A fifth flavor of quark, named bottom, is detected in the newly
discovered Upsilon meson. This pattern leads particle physicists to
believe they will find a sixth and final flavor of quark some day. This
predicted last flavor of quark is called top.
1983 The massive gauge bosons that carry the weak nuclear force, called
the W+,W- and Z0, are discovered and the Standard Model of
Particle Physics is confirmed.
1989 The lifetime of the Z0 weak nuclear gauge boson is measured, and
agrees precisely with there being exactly three kinds of neutrinos,
and no more.
1995 The top quark is finally directly observed and measured, confirming
the predictions of theorists that there are six flavors of quarks, as
described in the Standard Model.
Future The search goes on for the Higgs boson (the only particle predicted
by the Standard Model that hasn't been seen yet), for
supersymmetric particles predicted by string theory, for proton
decay and for magnetic monopoles predicted by Grand Unified
Theories, and new kinds of exotic unpredicted particles is
ongoing. Perhaps in a few years there will be some more interesting
entries for this page. Come back later and see.

Through a combination of theory and experiment, a mathematical model that

describes or explains all particle physics observed so far by physicists has been
worked out. This model is called the Standard Model. From the experimental point
of view, the Standard Model is studied and confirmed so well that things are, well,
almost boring.

The Standard Model consists of elementary particles grouped into two classes:
bosons (particles that transmit forces) and fermions (particles that make up
matter). The bosons have particle spin that is either 0, 1 or 2. The fermions have
spin 1/2.

Particles that transmit forces

Name Spin Electric Mass Observed?

charge
Graviton 2 0 0 Not yet
Photon 1 0 0 Yes
Gluon 1 0 0 Indirectly
W+ 1 +1 80 GeV Yes
W- 1 -1 80 GeV Yes
Z0 1 0 91 GeV Yes
Higgs 0 0 > 78 GeV Not yet

The table above lists the elementary particles in the Standard Model that transmit
the four forces observed in Nature. Note that the graviton isn't technically part of
the Standard Model but we'll include it anyway. The Standard Model is from a
technical standpoint incompatible with gravity, and that's why string theory
became an active field of theoretical physics.

When we say that quarks and gluons are observed "indirectly", we mean that
evidence of their existence inside hadrons exists but these particles have not
been observed singly. In the theory of quarks and gluons, they are believed to be
confined inside hadrons and unobservable as single particles, except possibly at
extremely high temperatures such as could be found very early in the Big Bang.

Particles that make up matter

The fermions in the Standard Model, particles that make up matter, seem to be
grouped into three generations. Notice that the quarks with charge 2/3 come in a
group of three, as do the quarks with charge -1/3, as do the electron, muon and
tau, and the electron, muon and tau neutrinos. In each group, the heavier
particles are shown in the larger type.

Theoretical physics has not explained why there are three generations of
particles that make up matter. Maybe string theory will come up with an answer
for this.

Name Spin Electric Mass Observed?

charge
Electron 1/2 -1 .0005 GeV Yes
Muon 1/2 -1 .10 Gev Yes
Tau 1/2 -1 1.8 Gev Yes

Name Spin Electric Mass Observed?

charge
Electron neutrino 1/2 0 0? Yes
Muon neutrino 1/2 0 <.00017 GeV Yes
Tau neutrino 1/2 0 <.017 GeV Yes
 Name Spin Electric Mass Observed?
charge
Up quark 1/2 2/3 .005 GeV Indirectly
Charm quark 1/2 2/3 1.4 GeV Indirectly
Top quark 1/2 2/3 174 GeV Indirectly

Name Spin Electric Mass Observed?

charge
Down quark 1/2 -1/3 .009 GeV Indirectly
Strange quark 1/2 -1/3 .17 GeV Indirectly
Bottom quark 1/2 -1/3 4.4 GeV Indirectly

One of the most important things to remember about physics is that Nature
looks different depending on the distance or energy scale being looked at.
Physical constants like the speed of light and Planck's constant have values that
tell us the size or energy where the the observable physics begins to change
substantially, and a different way of describing the physics mathematically is
called for.

Relativity

The first example is the speed of light

In a physical system where all the velocities that matter are much much less than
the speed of light, the system can usually be described very well by ordinary
Newtonian physics. When some important velocity in the system begins to
approach the speed of light, the Newtonian description doesn't fit so well any
more, and the system has to be described in fully relativistic terms using the
mathematics of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Quantum physics

The most important physical constant uncovered in the 20th century is Planck's
constant

which tells us about the distance or momentum scale where classical physics
stops making sense and a quantum description becomes necessary. (The unit
labeled eV is called an electron-volt, it is the amount of work one needs to do to
move one electron across one volt of electric potential. This is a standard unit for
measuring particle physics energy scales. You'll see more of it on this web site.)

Planck's constant, in the form of the de Broglie wavelength, tells us when the
wave/particle duality of quantum physics becomes measurable in a physical
object. The de Broglie wavelength of a particle of momentum p is

In quantum particle-wave duality, if the size of an object of momentum p is

smaller than its de Broglie wavelength, then quantum wave interference will be
measurable enough so that classical physics will fail to be a good description of
the object's behavior.

Planck's constant is a very very small number. The de Broglie wavelength of

something like a piece of cheese in the fridge would very very tiny. The cheese
would have to be subatomic size before quantum cheese effects would take over -
- and then it wouldn't be identifiable as cheese any longer.

Atomic physics

Planck's constant combined with the mass and electric charge of an electron
gives us another important number in physics called the Bohr radius

which tells us the average size of a hydrogen atom. The Bohr radius describes the
distance scale where atomic physics, using nonrelativistic quantum mechanics in
a classical electromagnetic field, is the best way to describe the physics.

Elementary particle physics

In elementary particle physics, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear

forces are described by a combination of relativity and quantum mechanics, called
relativistic quantum field theory. The important numbers for comparing these
three forces are called coupling constants, whose size measures the strength of
the respective force. For electromagnetism, the coupling constant is called the
fine structure constant a and is formed by the electron charge, Planck's constant
and the speed of light.

Notice this constant ends up being just a plain number, with no units associated
with it. That is what is meant by a dimensionless coupling constant.

The combination of Planck's constant with the speed of light and the electron
charge means this coupling constant is telling us about the quantum relativistic
physics of electromagnetism, that is, it tells us something about
electromagnetism at distance scales where quantum mechanics and special
relativity are both important to the physics at the same time.

There are also dimensionless coupling constants for the strong and weak
nuclear interactions. The table below compares their relative strengths and
ranges.

Force Symbol Strength Range

Strong nuclear as 1/3 10-15 m
force
Weak nuclear force aW 1/30 10-16 m
Electromagnetic aEM 7x10-3 Infinity
force

The weak nuclear force isn't actually that weak when measured by aW, but it
has the shortest range, because the gauge bosons are very heavy and have short
lifetimes, so they can't travel very far without decaying into lighter particles. The
strong nuclear force binds quarks into neutrons, protons and other hadrons, and
binds protons and neutrons into the nuclei of atoms, but because of quark
confinement, the strong force has a very small range as well.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Physicists originally had a lot of trouble reconciling relativistic quantum field

theory with the weak interaction that is responsible, for example, for what is
called beta decay of neutron into proton, electron and neutrino. The very short
range of weak interaction suggested that the gauge boson the mediated the force
must be very heavy. But quantum relativistic gauge field theories only seemed to
make sense if the gauge boson had zero mass.

The paradox was resolved by the discovery that a special type of coupling to a
particle called the Higgs could make the weak interaction gauge bosons able to
become very heavy without destroying the symmetries that make the quantum
theory mathematically consistent. This interaction between the gauge bosons and
Higgs particles is called spontaneous symmetry breaking, which is a misnomer
because the symmetry of the theory is still there, it's just hidden in the
interactions of the theory.

Spontaneous symmetry occurs at some energy scale determined by the

quantum interactions of the Higgs particle with itself, and this scale in turn
determines the mass of the gauge boson. If the scale of symmetry breaking is
very large, then it takes a very large particle accelerator to find evidence of the
effect. In 1983, this theory was confirmed by the direct observation of the heavy
gauge bosons in the powerful particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva. The masses
of the three weak interaction gauge bosons are now known to be

Gauge boson Mass

W+ 80 GeV
W- 80 GeV
Z0 91 GeV
Running coupling constants

Assigning a coupling strength to each force is tricky, however, because of the

quantum relativistic effect known as the running coupling constant. In quantum
relativistic field theory, the calculation of a simple particle interaction, say, an
electron interacting with another electron by exchanging a photon, is complicated
by an infinite series of possible virtual particle interactions in a cloud of quantum
relativistic fluctuations.

That cloud of quantum relativistic fluctuations changes the measured value of

the coupling constant and makes it depend on the energy scale at which one is
trying to measure it.

The electromagnetic coupling constant increases with energy. The strong and
weak nuclear coupling constants decrease with energy. The strong force in
particular exhibits a property called asymptotic freedom. The force that binds
quarks together into a proton gets stronger at lower energy but becomes
negligible at very high energies. That's why, in very high energy scattering
experiments, the quarks inside a proton scatter almost like free particles.

A unified theory

The three running coupling constants wind up having the same strength at
some very high energy scale, much higher than the weak interaction scale of
about 80 GeV. That fact, and some nifty mathematics concerning particle
multiplets in group theory convinced physicists that there should be some energy
scale where these three forces all have the same strength and where all the
different types of particles fit into the same mathematical theory in one unified
group. This type of elementary particle theory is called a Grand Unified Theory or
GUT for short.

The three gauge groups of the Standard Model of known elementary particle
physics are SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). In a Grand Unified Theory, these three groups all
fit into a single unified group with a unified set of gauge bosons whose number is
determined by the properties of the unified group. The most studied theories
have been SU(5) and SO(10). The same process of spontaneous symmetry
breaking that makes the weak bosons massive at a scale of 80 GeV is invoked by
physicists to make most of the unified gauge bosons massive at a much higher
scale.

When physicists look for a mass scale where the three known running coupling
constants run into a single value necessary for a Grand Unified Theory, they find
a very high mass scale of

This mass scale is far too high to be reached by particle accelerators in the near
or distant future.

But there is a way to test Grand Unified Theories without probing that mass
scale directly. The weak interaction was discovered because of beta decay, where
a neutron decays into a proton, and electron and a neutrino. In a Grand Unified
Theory, something like beta decay can happen to a proton. Even a small rate of
proton decay would be disastrous and very noticeable, because the stability of the
proton is the basis for the stability of all known matter in the Universe. So far, no
evidence of proton decay has been observed in experiments set up to detect it.

What about gravity?

The natural constant that describes the measured strength of the gravitational
force is called Newton's constant. This is the constant that appears in Newton's
law for the gravitation force between two objects (written here in its
generalization to higher dimensions, where d is the dimension of spacetime)

Newton's constant is very different from the speed of light and Planck's constant,
because the units depend on the number of spacetime dimensions

Gravity feels like a strong force at the macroscopic distance scales where
humans experience it, but gravity is a very very weak force from a microscopic
point of view. For example, the equivalent of the fine structure constant for an
electron and a proton interacting according to Newton's law is

The gravitational radius of an object of mass M is a distance scale made from

Newton's constant and the speed of light

When the size of an object approaches its gravitational radius, the object can
collapse into a black hole. This gives a natural length scale where we expect the
system to be described by the Einstein equations rather than by Newtonian
physics.

The natural length scale at which quantum gravity should become important is
called the Planck length, made from Newton's constant (in four dimensions), the
speed of light and Planck's constant.
 In string theory, the set of physical quantum states usually contains a graviton
that gives rise to gravitational interactions. Therefore, it has been widely
assumed that the natural distance scale of string theory should be the Planck
scale. However string theories contain many duality symmetries that connect a
string theory at one distance scale to a different string theory at a different scale.
So the idea of a distance scale itself is not as firm and reliable in string theory as
it it normally is in quantum field theory.

String theory is supposed to contain the physics of the quantum behavior of

gravity. This implies a very subtle and rich structure where the idea of distance
itself is shifting and obscure.

Even though the natural length scale of string theory is much much much much
too small to be measured directly in particle experiments, there are aspects of
string theory that might be measurable with today's technology or with
technology of the near future.

One of the predictions of string theory is that at higher energy scales we should
start to see evidence of a symmetry that gives every particle that transmits a
force (a boson) a partner particle that makes up matter ( a fermion), and vice
versa.

This symmetry between forces and matter is called supersymmetry. The

partner particles are called superpartners.

Known particles that transmit forces, and their possible superpartners

Name Spin Superpartner Spin

Graviton 2 Gravitino 3/2
Photon 1 Photino 1/2
Gluon 1 Gluino 1/2
W+,- 1 Wino+,- 1/2
Z0 1 Zino 1/2
Higgs 0 Higgsino 1/2

Known particles that make up matter, and their possible superpartners

Name Spin Superpartner Spin

Electron 1/2 Selectron 0
Muon 1/2 Smuon 0
Tau 1/2 Stau 0
Neutrino 1/2 Sneutrino 0
Quark 1/2 Squark 0

In current particle experiments we can't yet see any direct evidence for the
existence of superpartners for known elementary particles (there is some indirect
evidence, however). There is a good chance we could start to see superpartners
in future particle experiments. If that happened, it could turn out to be evidence
for string theory. This could take place in the next five or ten years, so come back
to this web site for further news.
 One troubling aspect of spontaneously broken gauge field theories based on the
Higgs mechanism of giving mass to gauge bosons is that it's not only the coupling
constants, but also the masses, that get renormalized by quantum corrections
from taking into account all possible virtual processes at all possible momentum
scales.

Suppose there is new physics at some scale L, so that the Standard Model of
particle physics is no longer adequate to describe physics at higher momentum
scales. The quantum corrections to fermion masses would depend on that cutoff
scale L only logarithmically

whereas the scalar Higgs particles would exhibit a quadratic dependence on the
cutoff scale

This means that the masses of Higgs particles are very sensitive to the scale at
which new physics emerges.

This sensitivity is called the gauge hierarchy problem, because the Higgs mass
is related to the masses of the gauge bosons in the spontaneously broken gauge
theory. The original question "How do the gauge bosons get mass without
spoiling gauge invariance?" was only partially answered by the Higgs mechanism.
In a way, question wasn't answered by the Higgs mechanism, it was just
transferred up to a new level, to the question: "Why does the Higgs mass remain
stable against large quantum corrections from high energy scales?"
The interesting thing about scalar mass divergences from virtual particle loops
is that virtual fermions and virtual bosons contribute with opposite signs and
could cancel each other completely if for every boson, there were a fermion of the
same mass and charge.

At the level of quantum mechanics, this type of Fermi-Bose symmetry would

entail some quantum operator, let's call it Q, whose action would be to transform
bosons into fermions, and vice versa. In operator language this would be written

And since this is a symmetry, this operator must commute with the Hamiltonian

Such a theory is called a supersymmetric theory, and the operator Q is called the
supercharge. Since the supercharge corresponds to an operator that changes a
particle with spin one half to a particle with spin one or zero, the supercharge
itself must be a spinor that carries one half unit of spin of its own.

Supersymmetry is such a powerful idea because it is a symmetry under the

exchange of classical and quantum physics. Bosons are particles that obey Bose
statistics, meaning that any number of them can occupy the same quantum state
at the same time. Fermions obey Fermi statistics and only one fermion can
occupy any given quantum state at one time. But the classical limit of quantum
physics is approached when the occupation numbers of available states are very
high. For example, in this limit, the quantum photon field behaves like the
classical electromagnetic field as described by Maxwell's equations. But then the
conclusion for fermions is that there is no classical limit for fermions. Fermionic
fields are inherently quantum relativistic phenomena.

Therefore, any symmetry that exchanges fermions and bosons is a symmetry

that exchanges physics that has a classical limit with physics that has no classical
limit. So such a symmetry should have very powerful consequences indeed.

One big problem with supersymmetry: in the particle physics that is observed
in today's accelerators, every boson most definitely does NOT have a matching
fermion with the same mass and charge. So if supersymmetry is a symmetry of
Nature, it must somehow be broken. It's easy enough for an expert to construct a
supersymmetric theory. It's breaking the symmetry, without destroying the
beneficial effects of that symmetry, that has been the hardest part of the
program to fulfill.

But would a broken supersymmetric theory still be able to solve the gauge
hierarchy problem? That depends on the scale at which the supersymmetry is
broken, and the method by which it is broken. In other words, it's still an open
question. Stay tuned.

How was supersymmetry developed?

Supersymmetry was not developed originally as a means of solving the gauge

hierarchy problem. Supersymmetry was first developed independently by two
different groups of theorists separated by the Cold War back in the 1970s. One
group in the USSR was exploring the mathematics of space-time symmetry, and
the other group in the West was trying to add fermions to bosonic string theory.

In the USSR, mathematicians Gol'fand and Likhtman wanted to do something

exotic with the group theory of spacetime symmetries. The usual group of
spacetime symmetries in relativistic quantum field theory is called the Poincaré
group. This group includes symmetries under spatial rotations, spacetime boosts
and translations in space and time.

The action of the group can be described by the algebra of the group, which is
defined by a set of commutation relations between the generators of infinitesimal
group transformations. The algebra of the Poincaré group looks like:

The momentum generator Pm generates space and time translations. The Lorentz
matrices Jmn generate rotations in space and Lorentz boosts in spacetime. These
are all bosonic symmetries, which ought to be true because momentum
conservation and Lorentz invariance are present in classical physics.

But the Poincaré group also has representations that describe fermions. Since
spin 1/2 particles arise as solutions to a relativistically invariant equation -- the
Dirac equation -- this is to be expected. If there are spin 1/2 particles, could
there be spin 1/2 symmetry generators in a spacetime symmetry algebra? Yes!
One way to add them is shown below:

What are the new symmetry generators labeled by Q? These are the
supercharges mentioned above.

What Gol'fand and Likhtman ended up with was the group theory of
supersymmetric transformations in four spacetime dimensions, and using this
new type of symmetry, they constructed the first supersymmetric quantum field
theory.

Unfortunately for them, their work was ignored, both in the Soviet Union and in
the West, until years later when supersymmetry finally mushroomed into a major
topic of investigation in particle physics. In 1972, Gol'fand was judged one of the
least important researchers in his group at FIAN in Moscow, and so he was let go
in a cost reduction drive in 1973. He remained unemployed for seven years, until
pressure from the world physics community led to his rehiring in 1980.

From strings to superstrings

In the West, physicists working on dual resonance models were beginning to

understand them in terms of vibrating strings whose modes of vibration were
solutions to the wave equation on the worldsheet swept out by the string as it
propagated in spacetime. The modes of oscillation all have integer spin, and so
these dual resonance models described bosonic string theory. In bosonic string
theory, negative and zero norm states are eliminated from the spectrum by fixing
the spacetime dimension D=26, which gives a conformally invariant worldsheet
theory and a Poincaré invariant theory in spacetime. The infinite-dimensional
Virasoro algebra

was discovered to be the string worldsheet analog of the Poincaré algebra in

spacetime, except for the last term, called the "central extension", which arises
from quantum effects and is canceled when the dimension of spacetime is 26.
 But in order to describe Nature, a theory must contain fermions. Physicist
Pierre Ramond began to investigate solutions to the Dirac equation on the string
worldsheet, and found that this led to a much larger symmetry algebra than the
Virasoro algebra, one that included anticommuting operators Fn (the worldsheet
analog of the supercharge Q). Ramond discovered the super-Virasoro algebra

or the algebra of a supersymmetric version of conformal invariance, which is

called superconformal invariance.

At the same time, John Schwarz and André Neveu were working on a new
bosonic string theory that had an anticommuting field with half integral boundary
conditions on the world sheet. They also found a super-Virasoro algebra, but one
that looked slightly different from what Ramond had found. It was soon realized
that the theories developed by Ramond and by Neveu and Schwarz fit together
into two sectors of the same theory, called the RNS model after the initials of the
founders. In this case, the central extension cancels for d=10.

Physicists Gervais and Sakita put the two pictures together into a theory
described by a two-dimensional worldsheet action and noted that this action was
invariant under a global (that is, independent of position) symmetry that
transformed bosons into fermions and vice versa. In other words, string theories
with fermions were supersymmetric theories.

But the supersymmetry they uncovered was confined to the two dimensional
surface swept out by the string as it propagated through spacetime. The super-
Virasoro algebra represents an extension of the worldsheet symmetry of the
theory from conformal invariance to superconformal invariance. What wasn't
understood yet was whether this worldsheet supersymmetry led to
supersymmetry in the spacetime in which the string propagates. Or in other
words, whether there was an analogous extension of the spacetime symmetry of
the theory from Poincaré invariance to super-Poincaré invariance.

The biggest problem with bosonic string theory (aside from the lack of
fermions) is that the lowest energy state was a tachyon, or a particle mode with
negative mass squared. This means the vacuum state of the theory is unstable.

In the mid-seventies Gliozzi, Scherk and Olive realized that they could
implement a rule to consistently discard certain states from the RNS model, and
after this truncation, known as the GSO projection, was made on the string
spectrum in ten spacetime dimensions, the ground state was massless, and the
theory was tachyon free.

But string theory was out of favor by the mid-seventies, and as the number of
physicists working in the field dropped, the pace of work on the theory slowed. It
took another five years for John Schwarz and Mike Green to get together to
reformulate the RNS description in a way such that the spacetime supersymmetry
of the theory is visible and obvious. So in 1981 superstring theory was born.

From supersymmetry to supergravity

One of the complicating factors in string theory is that one cannot avoid
gravity. And gravity complicates supersymmetry. It changes the supersymmetry
from a global to a local symmetry.

First let's discuss ordinary spacetime supersymmetry in a bit more detail.

Remember that the supercharge Q acts on bosonic and fermionic states as

The operator Q is a spinor with spin 1/2. A supersymmetric field theory can be
constructed by studying the variation of some field f by an infinitesimal spinor x
in the Q direction such that

Then the appropriate terms in an action for the field can be constructed by
demanding that the action be invariant under a variation by x.

If x is a constant spinor, i.e. not a function of spacetime position x(x), then the
supersymmetry is a global symmetry. One can take the usual scalar, spinor and
gauge fields, such as those present in the Standard Model, add some number of
supercharges QI, figure out how each field in the action transforms under a
variation by x, and then figure out what terms to add to the action to cancel the
overall variation variation by x and make the theory globally supersymmetric. For
one supercharge, the theory is called N=1 supersymmetry. If there are two
supercharges, it is N=2 supersymmetry, etc.

The result of this exercise for a single supercharge is called the Minimal
Supersymmetric Standard Model, or MSSM, and this will be discussed in the next
section. The new fields in the MSSM have funny names. Higgsinos and gauginos
are the names of the fermionic superpartners of the Higgs scalars and gauge
bosons respectively. The scalar superpartners of quarks and electrons are called
squarks and selectrons. Grand Unified Theories can also be turned into
supersymmetric theories, and this will also be discussed in the next section.

If x is not a constant spinor, in order words x = x(x), then the picture changes.
The loss of global Poincaré invariance means there is a dynamic spacetime
geometry, i.e. gravity, rather than the rigid flat spacetime upon which the
Standard Model is based. In this case, instead of mere supersymmetry, we have
supergravity. There is a new gauge field for this new local symmetry, although
since x(x) is a spinor, the new gauge field has spin 3/2. It's called the gravitino
because it is the superpartner of the graviton. The infinitesimal variation of the
gravitino under the spinor x(x) can be written
 Superstring theories invariably contain gravity. Therefore the low energy
effective field theory that one gets when looking at a string theory at an energy
scale so low that the strings look just like their massless particle modes is
generally a supergravity theory. However, the topic of supergravity was
developed independently from string theory, because eventually particle theorists
began to look for quantum field theories that had larger symmetry groups than
the Standard Model or Grand Unified Theories.

By the time Green and Schwarz realized that their GSO-projected, tachyon-free
fermionic string theories had spacetime supersymmetry as well as the worldsheet
variety, there was already a community at work understanding the implications of
supersymmetry for particle physics. In 1984, when Green and Schwarz
discovered the anomaly cancellation for Type I superstrings based on the gauge
group SO(32), the most talked-about candidate for a unified field theory was a
quantum field theory based on N=1 supergravity in eleven spacetime dimensions.
Now both theories are a part of a larger framework that some people call M-
theory.

If supersymmetry is a prediction of superstring theory, and whatever larger

theory that may encompass it, then it is important to know:

a. How is supersymmetry broken to give the non-supersymmetric world we see

so far?

b. b. What are the signs of supersymmetry that might show up in particle

physics experiments?

Constructing Supersymmetric Models

A supersymmetric particle model consists of a collection of particle

supermultiplets and a set of potentials that describe the interactions between
the particles. The three potentials relevant to supersymmetry are: the
superpotential W, the Kähler potential K, and the potential V for the scalar fields
in the theory, derived from W and K.

For N=1 supersymmetry in four spacetime dimensions, the two possible types
of supersymmetric particle multiplets are: the chiral multiplet, with a complex
scalar field f with spin 0 and a chiral (that is, either right or left handed) fermion
y with spin 1/2, and the vector multiplet, composed of a real (nonchiral)
fermion l with spin 1/2 and a vector field Am with spin 1.

Local gauge symmetry can be combined with global supersymmetry

relatively easily. If a gauge field transforms according to the rule

where La is an infinitesimal gauge parameter, and the coefficients fabc are the
structure constants of the group, then the spin 1/2 superpartner partner for the
gauge field, called the gaugino, transforms as

The chiral and vector multiplets by themselves describe massless

noninteracting particles. A mass matrix Mij for fermions, and Yukawa couplings
yijk between fermions and scalars, can be added to theory as long as the action
remains invariant under both gauge transformations and supersymmetry. The
chiral multiplet contains an auxiliary field (with no kinetic term in the action) Fi,
but the equations of motion equate it to a derivative of the superpotential, with
no dynamic evolution of its own.

So in the end, in a model with several generations of chiral multiplets (fi,yi),

the action with superpotential looks like

where the terms

are derivatives of the superpotential

with respect to the scalar fields.

The situation for gauge fields is a little more complicated, but similar. The
supersymmetry transformation rules for the gauge field and the gaugino require
an auxiliary field Da, where a labels a generator in the gauge algebra.

The resulting scalar potential of the theory, which is important for

understanding the ground state of the full theory, can be written

The D-term in this potential, from the gauge multiplet auxiliary field Da,
depends on the gauge coupling g and the gauge group generators Ta.

The Kähler potential will come in later in the section on supergravity.

The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model

If supersymmetry is to solve the gauge hierarchy problem in the Standard

Model, then the Standard Model has to be derivable as a theory with
supersymmetry. When all of the Standard Model fields are expressed in terms
of chiral and gauge multiplets, and interactions terms are added, the resulting
particle theory is called the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, or MSSM
for short.
 The particles predicted by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model are all
of the particles that are already observed in the Standard Model, plus one extra
Higgs doublet, and the supersymmetry partners of those particles.

Every chiral fermion in the Standard Model has a scalar superpartner;

collectively these scalars are referred to as the sfermions, which divide like
quarks and leptons into squarks and sleptons. The complex scalar Higgs SU(2)
doublet from the Standard Model has a spin 1/2 superpartner called the
Higgsino, as does the extra Higgs doublet that was made necessary by the
supersymmetrization. The gauge bosons in the Standard Model have fermionic
superpartners in the MSSM called gauginos.

At this stage of the discussion, we're still in an imaginary supersymmetric

world. The world we observe does not feature bosons and fermions all neatly
paired up together as if they were ready to board Noah's Ark. So a realistic
Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model requires a realistic method of breaking
supersymmetry while still preserving the effects of supersymmetry in stabilizing
the sensitivity of the Higgs mass to quantum corrections.

Supersymmetry breaking and unification

As was learned in the case of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the

electroweak interactions, a theory can "have its symmetry cake and eat it too"
by having a ground state that does not feature the full symmetry of the action.

The superpotential for a supersymmetric theory yields a scalar potential

V(f,f*) = |F|2 + |D|2/2, which is either positive or zero. This means any ground
state in the theory must have positive or zero energy. A supersymmetric
vacuum has zero supercharge. But because the supersymmetry algebra relates
the supercharge to the energy, so that the ground state energy can be
rewritten as products of the supercharges, a vacuum with zero supercharge
must also have zero energy. Therefore one can break supersymmetry
spontaneously by adding terms to the action such that either |F| or |D| or both
are nonzero.

To break supersymmetry using the D-term from the gauge sector of the
theory, a gauge term is added to the superpotential that is invariant under
supersymmetry up to a total derivative. This turns out to require an extra
unbroken U(1) gauge symmetry which is not present in the MSSM (and not
observed in Nature). So this method requires looking for a theory beyond the
Standard Model in which this extra U(1) field can live.

To break supersymmetry using the F-term, one can add chiral multiplets that
transform as singlets under the gauge symmetries in the theory. This method
also requires extra fields not observed in Nature.

It is also possible to break supersymmetry non-spontaneously, or explicitly,

by directly adding so-called "soft terms" to the superpotential that give mass to
the gauginos and scalars. "Soft" in this context means terms having mass
dimension 2 or 3, to avoid quadratic divergences in the quantum corrections.

Note that the is the only way to break global supersymmetry that is
consistent with Standard Model physics is to add soft terms explicitly.
 But this is hardly a satisfactory way of resolving the gauge hierarchy problem,
because instead of having to fine tune the theory to tame large quantum
corrections to the Higgs mass, new arbitrary supersymmetry breaking
parameters have to be added to the physics by hand. That is in effect passing
the gauge hierarchy problem upstairs.

If global supersymmetry doesn't work, then what about local supersymmetry,

i.e. supergravity?

Going from global to local supersymmetry means adding gravity to the

theory. So supersymmetry starts to expand upward and involve unification very
naturally. One desires to have a spontaneously broken supersymmetric theory,
and then unification of elementary particle physics with gravity appears as a
necessary ingredient.

Supergravity

When supersymmetry is a local symmetry, in addition to chiral and vector

multiplets, there is another multiplet with the graviton and its supersymmetry
partner, the gravitino. Since the graviton has spin 2, the gravitino Yam, has spin
3/2, and can be seen in some way as the gauge field of local supersymmetry.
Breaking supersymmetry means giving mass to the gravitino.

As with a gauge boson, the gravitino can gain mass when the ground state of
the scalar potential breaks the symmetry of the action. In the bosonic Higgs
scenario, the massless Goldstone modes of the scalar field end up as the extra
longitudinal components that make the massless gauge boson massive. In the
supersymmetric case, in addition to Goldstone bosons, there are massless
fermionic states called Goldstinos, and they provide the longitudinal modes that
give mass to the gravitino and break supersymmetry.

With supergavity, we have the interesting possibility of breaking

supersymmetry through gravitational couplings. For simple N=1 supergravity with
a chiral multiplet, the Kähler potential looks like

with MP is the Planck mass and W is the superpotential of the theory. The
resulting scalar potential for this theory is

In this model, the gravitino acquires a mass by eating a massless Goldstino, but
because of the minus sign in the scalar potential, the total vacuum energy can be
tuned to be zero. This is important because the total vacuum energy gives the
cosmological constant of the theory, and the one that has been measured is
extremely small.

How to test supersymmetry

One experimental and theoretical result that is very encouraging evidence for
supersymmetry is the high energy behavior of three Standard Model coupling
constants (two electroweak and one strong). As stated on a previous page, the
search for a Grand Unified Theory with all Standard Model fields gathered into
representations of one big Lie group was encouraged by projections that the
three Standard Model coupling constants meet at a single value at some energy
scale M = MGUT.

However, when quantum corrections are included, this agreement does not
occur precisely at a single value. The three coupling constants come much closer
to a single value when the model in which they are being calculated is the
Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.

So supersymmetry suggests unification, and unification suggests

supersymmetry.

None of this is proof, but it adds a lot of excitement to the search for proof.

One thing that a supersymmetric theory should NOT do is violate any of the
observed conservation laws of particle interactions. One important observed
conservation law that is easily violated by unified theories and supersymmetric
theories is the conservation of baryon number.

The proton is the lightest baryon and hence, if baryon number is conserved, the
proton should be extremely stable. The observed lifetime of the proton is
currently measured to be

Grand unified theories (GUT for short) have gauge bosons that can mediate
interactions that change quarks into leptons and hence allow the proton to decay
by various interactions, including

where a proton, with baryon number 1, decays into a positron, which is a lepton
and has baryon number 0, and a neutral pion, which is made of a quark and an
antiquark and has baryon number 0. There are three quarks on the left hand side
of the equation and two quarks and a lepton on the right hand side. If baryon
number is not conserved, then the stable proton becomes unstable. The estimate
for the proton lifetime in a GUT without supersymmetry is

So this is bad for unification.

In a GUT with supersymmetry there can also be baryon and lepton number
violation, but for many reasons, the rate ends up being smaller so that

which is still an experimentally viable number, and a region that is close enough
to the observed rate for future measurements, for example, at at the Super-
Kamiokande experiment in Japan, to be able to tell us something meaningful
about supersymmetry.

Dark matter and SUSY

Because of the way stars move inside galaxies, astronomers and astrophysicists
have calculated that there is a huge amount of mass in the Universe that we can't
see with telescopes or other instruments because it's not giving off light the way
stars do. That's why they call it dark matter.

The presence of this dark matter can be detected by seeing how it interacts
gravitationally, but it's been hard to figure out what it could be made of. One of
the leading candidates for dark matter is a supersymmetry particle called the
LSP, for Lightest Supersymmetric Particle.

The success of this idea depends on the stability of the LSP. The LSP is stable in
supersymmetric theories with a symmetry called R-parity, which guarantees that
supersymmetric particles are produced only in pairs. This means that a
supersymmetric particle can only decay into another supersymmetric particle.
Hence the lightest one is stable because it can't decay into anything.

The LSP that could make up dark matter has to be massive and electrically
neutral, therefore, it could only be the supersymmetry partner of a neutral
particle. The three candidates are: a gravitino (fermionic superpartner to the
graviton), a sneutrino (scalar superpartner to the neutrino) or a neutralino
(fermionic superpartner to a neutral gauge boson or neutral Higgs scalar).

So far the most promising candidate for dark matter is the neutralino, because
they interact weakly. Therefore they would decouple from thermal equilibrium at
some early age of the universe and produce a stable residual density that could
be large enough to provide the large amount of dark matter that is believed to be
out there.

There are a lot of hints that supersymmetry could be out there, because it
offers ways to solve many puzzling issues in particle physics and cosmology at
once.

This is another arrow pointing to string theory, the only theory of elementary
particles that requires both supersymmetry and gravity to exist in Nature.

Extra dimensions in Newtonian gravity

Theoretical physicists didn't start studying higher dimensional theories of

fundamental physics until after the modern era of 20th century quantum
mechanics and relativity had begun. But the physical consequences of extra
dimensions of space can be worked out in Newtonian physics and it is there that
we actually find the first and most important observational constraint on the
number of space dimensions in our Universe.

The first thing we need to know about an extra dimension is: is it compact or
noncompact? An example of a noncompact dimension is the infinite line of real
numbers that makes the axis of a rectangular coordinate system, say the x axis.
The line has a one-dimensional volume that is infinite. An example of a compact
dimension would be rolling the x axis into a closed circle of radius R, which then
has a finite volume of 2pR.

The length of the infinitesimal line element in spherical coordinates in D

noncompact dimensions is

where dWD-1 represents the D-1 angular terms in the metric. The gravitational
potential F(r) solves the Laplace equation with a point source, which generalizes
in D dimensions to

The force F(r) is proportional to the gradient of the potential F(r), so therefore
the force must vary with distance from the source as GD/rD-1, where GD is
Newton's constant, which determines the strength of the gravitational coupling,
as measured in D space dimensions. (Remember, in Newtonian gravity time isn't
being treated as a dimension yet.)

Extra noncompact dimensions would change the force law of gravity away from
being the inverse square law that has been and still is measured experimentally.
This would drastically alter the behavior of planets, because it's only in an inverse
square potential that the equations of motion of Newtonian gravity predict stable
closed orbits. So astronomers and physicists can set limits on possible extra
dimensions without even going to fancy accelerators, by watching the orbits of
planets and satellites.

A compact extra dimension has a completely different effect on the Newtonian

force law. In a D-dimensional space with one dimension compactified on circle of
radius R with an angular coordinatea that is periodic with period 2p, the line
element becomes

The force law derived from the potential that solves the Laplace equation
becomes

So if we added an extra compact space dimension to our three existing

noncompact space dimensions, then D=4, but D-2=2, so the force law is still an
inverse square law. The Newtonian force law only cares about the number of
noncompact dimensions. At distances much larger than R, An extra compact
dimension can't be detected gravitationally by an altered force law.

The effect of adding an extra compact dimension is more subtle than that. It
causes the effective gravitational constant to change by a factor of the volume
2pR of the compact dimension. If R is very small, then gravity is going to be
stronger in the lower dimensional compactified theory than in the full higher-
dimensional theory.

So if this were our Universe, the Newton's constant that we measure in our
noncompact 3 space dimensions would have a strength equal to the full Newton's
constant of the total 4-dimensional space, divided by the volume of the compact
dimension.

That's an important detail, because the size of the gravitational coupling

constant is what determines the distance scale of quantum gravity. So the
distance scale of quantum gravity has to be very carefully defined in theories with
compactified extra dimensions.

The Kaluza-Klein idea

Why would anyone consider a theory with extra dimensions? Because this turns
out to provide a convenient mathematical framework for unifying gravity with
electromagnetism and the other known forces. The first consideration of this idea
occurred in the 1920s in separate work by Theodore Kaluza and Oskar Klein.

Consider a 5-dimensional spacetime with space coordinates x1,x2,x3,x4 and time

coordinate x0, where the x4 coordinate is rolled up into a circle of radius R so that
x4 is the same as x4+2pR

Suppose the metric components are all independent of x4. The spacetime metric
can be decomposed into components with indices in the three noncompact
directions (signified by a,b below) or with indices in the x4 direction:

The four ga4 components of the metric look like the components of a spacetime
vector in four spacetime dimensions that could be identified with the vector
potential of electromagnetism with the usual field strength Fab

The field strength is invariant under a a reparametrization of the compact x4

dimension via
which acts like a U(1) gauge transformation, as it should if this is to act like
electromagnetism. This field obeys the expected equations of motion for an
electromagnetic vector potential in four spacetime dimensions. The g44
component of the metric acts like a scalar field and also has the appropriate
equations of motion.

In this model, something miraculous happens: a theory with a gravitational

force in five spacetime dimensions becomes a theory in four spacetime
dimensions with three forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, and scalar.

When the wave equation is solved in this spacetime, the periodic boundary
conditions in the compact x4 dimension lead to integer eigenvalues for the
momentum in that direction

This quantized momentum acts as the charge for the vector potential Aa. The
spectrum of the four-dimensional theory therefore includes an infinite number of
charged particles with mass

where n is an integer.

If R is very small, then the masses of these Kaluza-Klein modes are very large
even when n is small. So that means we'd need very high energy to create these
particles in an accelerator experiment. If R is very large, then the Kaluza-Klein
modes starts to form a continuous spectrum.

But those are not the only new states in the Kaluza-Klein spectrum. The g44
component of the metric propagates as a massless scalar field f(xa) in the
noncompact dimensions. This would result in a new long range force not observed
in Nature. So there has to be a way for this field to become massive, and quite a
lot of work has gone into trying to find a good answer to that question.

As in the Newtonian limit, the Newton's constant measured in four spacetime

dimensions is again derived from the full gravitational coupling constant in the
five-dimensional theory, divided by the volume (in this case a circumference) of
the compact dimension.

Kaluza-Klein compactification like this has been extended to many dimensions,

and to supergravity theories. The theory of eleven dimensional supergavity with
the extra seven space dimensions compactified on a seven dimensional sphere
was a very popular candidate before 1985, and now it is part of the bigger theory
that encompasses and relates all string theories, called M-theory.

Kaluza-Klein in string theory

Superstring theory is a possible unified theory of all fundamental forces, but

superstring theory requires a 10 dimensional spacetime, or else bad quantum
states called ghosts with unphysical negative probabilities become part of the
spectrum and spoil Lorentz invariance. Fermions are very complicated to work
with in higher dimensions, so for the sake of simplicity let's consider bosonic
string theory, which is Lorentz invariant and ghost-free (albeit tachyonic) in
d=26.

A particle trajectory only has one parameter: the proper time along the path of
the particle. Going from particles to strings adds a new parameter: the distance
along the string

and that's what makes the outcome of Kaluza-Klein compactification far more
interesting in string theory than it is in particle theory.

If we compactify x25 on a circle of radius R, we get the usual Kaluza-Klein

quantized momentum in that direction

We want gravity in the theory, so we need to look at closed strings. A closed

string can do something that a particle cannot do: get wrapped around the circle
in the compact dimension.

A closed string can be wrapped around the circle once, twice, or any number of
times, and the number of times the string is wrapped around the circle is called
the winding number w. The string oscillator sum in the x25 direction changes by a
constant piece in a way that is consistent with the periodicity of the closed string
and the compact dimension

The string tension Tstring is the energy per unit length of the string. If the string
is wound w times around a circular dimension with radius R, then the energy Ew
stored in the tension of the wound string is

The mass of an excited string depends on the number of oscillator modes N and
Ñ excited in the two directions of propagation around the closed string, minus the
constant vacuum energy. Kaluza-Klein compactification adds the quantized
momentum in the compact dimensions, and the tension energy from the string
being wrapped w times around the compact dimension, so that the total squared
mass becomes
 A very crucial feature of this mass equation is the symmetry under

This is what makes string theory so different from particle theory. The theory
doesn't really distinguish between the quantized momentum modes, and the
winding modes of the string in the compact dimension. This creates a symmetry
between small and large distances that is not present in Kaluza-Klein
compactification of a particle theory.

This symmetry is called T-duality. T-duality is a symmetry that relates different

string theories that everyone thought were completely unrelated before T-duality
was understood. T-duality preceded the Second Superstring Revolution.

The theory gains extra massless particles when the radius R of the compact
dimension takes the minimum value possible given the above symmetry of T-
duality, which is just the string scale itself

This is another purely stringy effect, not occurring with particles.

The Kaluza-Klein compactification of strings can be done on more than one

dimension at once. When n dimensions are compactified into circles, then this is
called toroidal compactification, because the product of n copies of a circle is an
n-torus, or Tn for short.

When fermions are added to make superstrings, the mathematics becomes

more complicated but the structures and symmetries become more rich. The
most studied superstring compactification is heterotic string theory compactified
on a Calabi-Yau space in six-dimensions (or three complex dimensions).

These general models all have in common that the spacetime is a direct
product

where M4 is the four-dimensional noncompact spacetime, and X6 is some six-

dimensional compact internal space. This means that the metric on M4 doesn't
depend at all on the coordinates in the internal space. In this case, the
gravitational coupling constant that we measure as Newton's constant GN is
related to the gravitational coupling G10 of the full ten-dimensional superstring
theory by

where VX is the volume of X6.

In terms of the Planck mass MPlanck, which is the quantum gravity mass scale
determined by the gravitational coupling GN, this relationship becomes
where the mass MS is the fundamental mass scale of the full ten-dimensional
theory.

Braneworlds

In the Kaluza-Klein picture, the extra dimensions are envisioned as being rolled
up in compact space with a very small volume, with massive excited states called
Kaluza-Klein modes whose mass makes them too heavy to be observed in current
or future accelerators.

The braneworld scenario for having extra dimensions while hiding them from
easy detection relies on allowing the extra dimensions to be noncompact, but
with a warped metric that depends on the extra dimensions and so is not a direct
product space. A simple model in five spacetime dimensions is the Randall-
Sundrum model, with metric

In this scenario, the three-dimensional space that we experience is a three-

dimensional subspace, called a 3-brane, located at f=0, with another 3-brane
located at f=p, or y=prc. The full four-dimensional space, or five-dimensional
spacetime, is referred to as the bulk. The warping or curving of the bulk gives rise
to a cosmological constant, which is proportional to the parameter k.

Since the extra space dimension is noncompact, we would expect the force law
of gravity to change. However in this picture, the warping of the brane causes the
the graviton to become bound to our brane, so that the graviton wave function
falls away very rapidly away in the direction of the extra dimension.

This spacetime also has oscillations in the extra dimension that are the Kaluza-
Klein modes, but in this case there is a continuous spectrum of modes. This would
seem to rule the model out, except that the Kaluza-Klein modes here are so
weakly coupled that they can't be detected on the brane.

Why would this model be preferable to having compact extra dimensions? In

Kaluza-Klein compactification, the Planck mass in the full ten-dimensional
superstring

The parameter M is the fundamental mass scale in the full theory in the bulk, and
k is about the same size as M. So for krc>>1, the Planck scale measured on our
brane would be about the same size as the Planck scale as measured in the full
theory. This avoids the situation in the Kaluza-Klein compactification where the
Planck mass in four spacetime dimensions depends on the volume of the
compactified space, which is hard to control dynamically.
How could they be observed?

One problem with theoretical models of gravity and particle physics is that
before they can make unique testable predictions of new physics, they have to be
worked on so that they don't contradict any existing theoretical or experimental
knowledge. That can be a long process, and it's not really over for superstring
theories or for braneworld models, especially not braneworld models derived from
superstring theories.

In superstring theory with Kaluza-Klein compactification, there are several

different energy scales that come into play in going from a string theory to a low
energy effective particle theory that is consistent with observed particle physics
and cosmology.

The attribute of superstring theory that looks the most promising for
experimental detection is supersymmetry. Supersymmetry breaking and
compactification of higher dimensions have to work together to give the low
energy physics we observe in accelerator detectors.

Braneworld models in general are very different from superstring Kaluza-Klein

compactification models because they don't require there to be so many steps
between the Planck scale and the electroweak scale. The huge difference between
the Planck scale and the electroweak scale is called the gauge hierarchy problem.

Supersymmetry is interesting to particle physicists because it can address this

problem. But some braneworld models need supersymmetry for the brane
geometry to be stable.
If supersymmetry is detected at next-generation particle physics experiments,
then the details of the supersymmetric physics will have something to say,
hopefully, about any underlying superstring model and whether there is Kaluza-
Klein compactification of extra space dimensions into some tiny rolled up internal
space, or whether we are all living as the four dimensional equivalent of flies
stuck on the wall of a higher dimensional Universe.

COSMOLOGY
The age of the Universe has been a subject of religious, mythological and
scientific importance. On the scientific side, Sir Isaac Newton's guess for the age
of the Universe was only a few thousand years. Einstein, the developer of the
General Theory of Relativity, preferred to believe that the Universe was ageless
and eternal. However, in 1929, observational evidence proved his fantasy was not
to be fulfilled by Nature.
 A very massive, very old cluster of galaxies,
as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

In order to understand this evidence, let's think about how a train sounds to a
person standing on the platform. An arriving train makes a noise that starts low
and gets higher pitched as the train approaches the listener, sounding like
oooooohEEEEEEEE. A departing train makes a noise that gets lower pitched as the
train goes away from the listener, sounding like EEEEEEEEoooooooh. This change
in the sound of the pitch of the train noise depending on whether it is arriving or
departing the listener is called the Doppler shift.

The Doppler shift happens with light as well as with sound. A source of light that
is approaching the viewer will seem to the viewer to have a higher frequency than
a source of light that is receding from that viewer. In 1929, observations of
distant galaxies showed that the light from those galaxies behaved as if they
were going away from us. If all the distant galaxies are all receding from us on
the average, that means that the Universe as a whole could be expanding. It
could be blowing up like a balloon.

If the Universe is expanding, then what did it expand from?

This is what tells us that the Universe probably does have a finite age, it probably
is not eternal and ageless as Einstein wanted to believe.

But then, okay, how old is the Universe?

We know from studies of radioactivity of the Earth and Sun that our solar system
probably formed about 4.5 billions years ago, which means that the Universe
must be at least twice that old, because before our solar system formed, our
Milky Way galaxy had to form, and that probably took several billions years by
itself.

It would be reasonable to guess that the Universe is at least twice as old as our
Sun and Earth. However, we can't do radioactive dating on distant stars and
galaxies. The best we can do is balance a lot of different measurements of the
brightness and distance of stars and the red shifting of their light to come up with
some ballpark figure. The oldest star clusters whose age we can estimate are
about 12 to 15 billions years old.

So it seems safe to estimate that the age of the Universe is at least 15 billion
years old, but probably not more than 20 billion years old.

This matter is far from being settled by astrophysicists and cosmologists, so stay
tuned. There could be radical new developments in the future.
First ingredient: quantum mechanics

In the early 20th century, it was realized that the stability of atomic matter
could not be explained using the Maxwell equations of classical electrodynamics.
This triumph belonged to quantum mechanics. The hydrogen atom was stable
because the possible energy states of the electron in the atom are quantized by
the rule

where n is an integer, and m is (approximately) the electron mass.

So when the electron changes energy for some reason, say by absorbing or
emitting electromagnetic radiation, it can only absorb or emit light of a
wavelength corresponding to the difference in quantized energy states of the
electron. The collection of wavelengths of light emitted by hydrogen gas is called
the emission spectrum of hydrogen, and there is a corresponding spectrum for
absorption. One of the great successes of quantum mechanics was the calculation
of the wavelengths in the observed hydrogen spectrum.

Second ingredient: relativity

The other great revolution that started the 20th century was the spacetime
revolution of special and general relativity. In special relativity, when a source of
light of wavelength lem is moving away from an observer at some velocity v, the
observer sees the light at some other wavelength lobs, determined by the principle
that the speed of light is the same for all observers. The fractional difference
between lem and lobs is called the red shift, denoted by the letter z, and is
computed from the relative velocity v between the source and observer by

where c is the speed of light. If the source and observer are moving towards one
another, the red shift becomes a blue shift and is given is given by taking v -> -v
in above.

Conclusion: the Universe is expanding

Stars are made mostly out of hydrogen and helium, and the emission spectrum
of the hydrogen atoms in a star in a far away galaxy ought to be the same as
that of hydrogen atoms in a tube of gas in a laboratory on Earth. But that's not
what Edwin Hubble found when he compared the emission spectra of different
stars and galaxies. Hubble found that the emission wavelengths of the hydrogen
gas were red shifted by an amount proportional to their distance from our solar
system. Hubble's Law relates the red shift z to the distance D through
where the empirical constant H0 is called Hubble's constant.

Hubble's observation suggested that the stars and galaxies in the Universe are
hurtling away from one another with a velocity that increases with distance, as if
the whole Universe was expanding, like in a big explosion. When physicists
extrapolated that motion backwards in time, it suggested that the Universe
started out very hot and dense and somehow exploded into the huge cold place
that we see today. Hubble's Law was an empirical observation that demanded,
and received, very intense attention from modern theoretical physics after it was
first proposed in 1924.

The equation of motion

When physicists want to study a given system, they turn to the equations of
motion for that system. According to the theory of general relativity, the correct
equation of motion for describing a Universe is the Einstein equation

relating the curvature of the spacetime in a given Universe to the distribution of

energy and momentum in that Universe. The energy-momentum tensor Tmn
includes all of the energy from all nongravitational sources such as matter,
electromagnetism or even quantum vacuum energy as we shall see later.

The standard cosmological solution to the Einstein equation is written in the

form of the Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric

The function a(t) is called the scale factor, because it tells us the size of the
Universe. The scale factor a(t) and the constant k are both determined by the
particular type of matter and/or radiation present in the Universe. This will be
described in the next section.

For any value of a(t) or k, the gravitational red shift z of light due to the
changing size of the Universe satisfies

where tobs is the time in the Universe that the light is being observed and tem is
the time when the light was first emitted.

The Hubble parameter H(t) gives the relative rate of change in the scale factor
a(t) by
The observed Hubble constant is just the current value of the dynamically
evolving Hubble parameter. The uncertainties of the currently observed value of
the Hubble constant have been lumped into the parameter h0.

How old?

A quick approximation for the age of the Universe can be approximated by the
inverse of the Hubble constant. The calculated age turns out to be

Current best estimates of h0 are

so the Universe is most likely somewhere between 12 and 16 billion years old, at
least according to this method of estimation.

But recall that according to relativity, time is relative. We can guess the amount
of time likely to have elapsed since the time when time was a meaningful
quantity that could be measured. But we can't say anything about any processes
that might have occurred before the notion of time made sense. In some sense,
quantum gravity could be an eternal stage of the Universe, and the Big Bang
could be regarded as the end of eternity and the beginning of time itself.

What is spacetime geometry?

Think of a very large ball. Even though you look at the ball in three space
dimensions, the outer surface of the ball has the geometry of a sphere in two
dimensions, because there are only two independent directions of motion along
the surface. If you were very small and lived on the surface of the ball you might
think you weren't on a ball at all, but on a big flat two-dimensional plane. But if
you were to carefully measure distances on the sphere, you would discover that
you were not living on a flat surface but on the curved surface of a large sphere.

The idea of the curvature of the surface of the ball can apply to the whole
Universe at once. That was the great breakthrough in Einstein's theory of general
relativity. Space and time are unified into a single geometric entity called
spacetime, and the spacetime has a geometry, spacetime can be curved just like
the surface of a large ball is curved.

When you look at or feel the surface of a large ball as a whole thing, you are
experiencing the whole space of a sphere at once. The way mathematicians
prefer to define the surface of that sphere is to describe the entire sphere, not
just a part of it. One of the tricky aspects of describing a spacetime geometry is
that we need to describe the whole of space and the whole of time. That means
everywhere and forever at once. Spacetime geometry is the geometry of all space
and all time together as one mathematical entity.
What determines spacetime geometry?

Physicists generally work by looking for the equations of motion whose

solutions best describe the system they want to describe. The Einstein equation is
the classical equation of motion for spacetime. It's a classical equation of motion
because quantum behavior is never considered. The geometry of spacetime is
treated as being classically certain, without any fuzzy quantum probabilities. For
this reason, it is at best an approximation to the exact theory.

The Einstein equation says that the curvature in spacetime in a given direction
is directly related to the energy and momentum of everything in the spacetime
that isn't spacetime itself. In other words, the Einstein equation is what ties
gravity to non-gravity, geometry to non-geometry. The curvature is the gravity,
and all of the "other stuff" -- the electrons and quarks that make up the atoms
that make up matter, the electromagnetic radiation, every particle that mediates
every force that isn't gravity -- lives in the curved spacetime and at the same
time determines its curvature through the Einstein equation.

What is the geometry of our spacetime?

As mentioned previously, the full description of a given spacetime includes not

only all of space but also all of time. In other words, everything that ever
happened and ever will happen in that spacetime.

Now, of course, if we took that too literally, we would be in trouble, because

we can't keep track of every little thing that ever happened and ever will happen
to change the distribution of energy and momentum in the Universe. Luckily,
humans are gifted with the powers of abstraction and approximation, so we can
make abstract models that approximate the real Universe fairly well at large
distances, say at the scale of galactic clusters.

To solve the equations, simplifying assumptions also have to be made about

the spacetime curvature. The first assumption we'll make is that spacetime can
be neatly separated into space and time. This isn't always true in curved
spacetime, in some cases such as around a spinning black hole, space and time
get twisted together and can no longer be neatly separated. But there is no
evidence that the Universe is spinning around in a way that would cause that to
happen. So the assumption that all of spacetime can be described as space
changing with time is well-justified.

The next important assumption, the one behind the Big Bang theory, is that at
every time in the Universe, space looks the same in every direction at every
point. Looking the same in every direction is called isotropic, and looking the
same at every point is called homogeneous. So we're assuming that space is
homogenous and isotropic. Cosmologists call this the assumption of maximal
symmetry. At the large distance scales relevant to cosmology, it turns out that
it's a reasonable approximation to make.

When cosmologists solve the Einstein equation for the spacetime geometry of
our Universe, they consider three basic types of energy that could curve
spacetime:

1. Vacuum energy
2. 2. Radiation
3. 3. Matter
The radiation and matter in the Universe are treated like a uniform gases with
equations of state that relate pressure to density.

Once the assumptions of uniform energy sources and maximal symmetry of

space have been made, the Einstein equation reduces to two ordinary differential
equations that are easy to solve using basic calculus. The solutions tell us two
things: the geometry of space, and how the size of space changes with time.

Open, closed or flat?

If at every time, space at every point looks the same in every direction, then
space has to have constant curvature. If the curvature was different at any point,
then space would look different in that direction from every other point. Therefore
if space is maximally symmetric, the curvature has to be the same at every point.

So that narrows us down to three options for the geometry of space: positive,
negative or zero curvature. When there is no vacuum energy present, just matter
or radiation, the curvature of space also tells us the time evolution of the
spacetime in question:

Positive: The unique N-dimensional space with

constant positive curvature is an N-dimensional
sphere. The cosmological scenario where space has
positive constant curvature is called a closed
Universe. In this spacetime, space expands from
zero volume in a Big Bang but then reaches a
maximum volume and starts to contract back to
zero volume in a Big Crunch.

Zero: A space with zero curvature is called (no

surprise here) a flat space. A flat space is
noncompact, space extends infinitely far in any
direction, so this option also represents an open
Universe. This spacetime has space expanding
forever in time. A sphere has constant
positive curvature.
Negative: The unique
N-dimensional space
with constant negative curvature is an N-
dimensional pseudosphere. To compare this funny
word with something more familiar, a hyperboloid is
a two-dimensional pseudosphere. With negative
curvature, space has infinite volume. The negative
curvature option represents an open Universe. This
spacetime also has space expanding forever in time.

What determines whether a Universe is open or

closed? For a closed Universe, the total energy
density r in the Universe has to be greater than the
value that gives a flat Universe, called the critical
A hyperboloid has constant density r0. Let W = r/r0. So a closed Universe has W
negative curvature. > 1, a flat Universe has W = 1 and an open
Universe has W < 1.
 The above analysis only takes into account energy from matter, and neglects
any vacuum energy that might be present. Vacuum energy leads to a constant
energy density that is called the cosmological constant.

Which behavior represents our observed Universe? To discuss the most recent
observations, first we need to look at dark matter and the cosmological constant.

Where does dark matter come in?

The matter in the Universe that we can see mainly consists of stars and hot gas
or other stuff that emits light of some wavelength that can be detected by either
our eyes, telescopes or complicated instrumentation. But for the last two
decades, astronomers have been seeing evidence of vast amounts of invisible
matter in the Universe.

For example, there doesn't seem to be enough visible matter in the form of
stars and interstellar gas to hold most galaxies together gravitationally. According
to estimates of how much mass would actually be needed to keep the average
galaxy from flying apart, it is now widely believed by physicists and astronomers
that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible. This matter is called dark
matter, and it's important for cosmology.

If there is dark matter, then what could it be made of? If it were made of
quarks like ordinary matter, then in the early Universe, more helium and
deuterium would have been produced than could exist in the Universe today.
Particle physicists tend to think that dark matter could consist of supersymmetric
particles that are very heavy but couple very weakly to the particles observed in
accelerators now.

The visible matter in the Universe is much less than closure density, therefore,
if there were nothing else, our Universe should be open. But is the dark matter
enough to close the Universe? In other words, if WB is the density of ordinary
matter and WD is the density of dark matter in the Universe today, does WB + WD
= 1? Studies of galactic motion show that even including dark matter, the total
only adds up to about 30% of closure density, with WB making up 5% and WD
accounting for as much as 25%.

But that's not the end of the story. There's another possible source of energy
in the Universe: the cosmological constant.

What about the cosmological constant?

Einstein didn't always like the conclusions of his own work. His equation of
motion for spacetime predicted that a Universe filled with ordinary matter would
expand. Einstein wanted a theory where the Universe stayed the same size
forever. To fix the Einstein equation, he added a term now called the
cosmological constant, that balanced the energy density of matter and radiation
to make a Universe that neither expanded nor contracted, but stayed the same
for eternity.

Once everyone accepted Hubble's evidence that the Universe was expanding,
Einstein's cosmological constant theory was abandoned. However, it was
resurrected by relativistic quantum theories where a cosmological constant arises
naturally and dynamically from the quantum oscillations of virtual particles and
antiparticles. This is called the quantum zero point energy, which is a possible
source of the vacuum energy of spacetime. The challenge in quantum theory is to
avoid producing too much vacuum energy, and that's one reason why physicists
study supersymmetric theories.

A cosmological constant can act to speed up or slow down the expansion of the
Universe, depending on whether it is positive or negative. When a cosmological
constant is added to a spacetime with matter and radiation, the story gets more
complicated than the simple open or closed scenarios described above.

What's the final answer?

The Big Bang began with a radiation dominated era, which accounted for the
first 10,000-100,000 years of the evolution of our Universe. Right now the
dominant forms of energy in our Universe are matter and vacuum energy. The
latest measurements from astronomers tell us:

1. Our Universe is pretty flat: The cosmic microwave background is the relic
of Big Bang thermal radiation, cooled to the temperature of 2.73° Kelvin.
But it didn't cool perfectly smoothly, and after the radiation cooled, there
were some lumps left over. The angular size of those lumps as observed
from our present location in spacetime depends on the spatial curvature of
the Universe. The currently observed lumpiness in the temperature of the
cosmic microwave background is just right for a flat Universe that expands
forever.

2. There is a cosmological constant: There is vacuum energy, or

something that acts just like IT, to make the expansion of the Universe
accelerate in time. The acceleration of the Universe can be seen in the
redshifts of distant supernovae.

3. Most of the matter in the Universe is dark matter: Studies of galatic

motion show that ordinary visible matter in stars, galaxies, planets, and
interstellar gas only makes up a small fraction of the total energy density of
the Universe.

The Universe at our current epoch has (approximately)

So right now the density of vacuum energy in our Universe is only about twice as
large as the energy density from dark matter, with the contribution from visible
baryonic matter almost negligible. The total adds up to a flat universe which
should expand forever.

The starting point of a theoretical exploration of cosmology is the Einstein

equation

with a metric of the form

The spacetime being modeled by this equation can be neatly separated into time
and space, so we can talk of this spacetime as representing the evolution of
space in time.

The space part of this spacetime is homogeneous (looks the same at any point
in a given direction) and isotropic (looks the same in any direction from a given
point). This is an abstract ideal approximation to the Universe, but it's one that
has worked extremely well from an observational point of view, as will be shown
below.

There are three options for the spatial geometry of a spacetime with the above
metric, represented by three choices for the value of the parameter k: k=1, k=0
or k=-1. The condition of being spatially homogeneous and isotropic means that
the surfaces of constant time t have constant curvature, which can be either
positive, zero or negative.

A sphere has constant A hyperboloid has constant

positive curvature. negative curvature.

To solve the Einstein equation, we need to postulate some "stuff" in the

spacetime, such as matter, radiation or vacuum energy, with energy momentum
tensor Tmn whose components are the energy density r and pressure p of the
"stuff" in question. The equations for the scale factor a(t) are

Here we have truncated Newton's constant GN to plain G. The top equation

contains the condition for the closure density of the Universe explained below.
 There are many different kinds of "stuff" that can be a part of the energy
density r, with different equations of state relating r to the pressure p. For
bookkeeping purposes, let's label each different r by an index i, so that ri refers to
the energy density from the ith type of "stuff" in this spacetime. Let's also set
something called the critical density rcrit and then make the above equation
dimensionless by dividing everything by the critical density:

Let's call W the density parameter. The equation that will tell us the curvature of
space from the stuff content of the spacetime becomes

The three possibilities for the value of the parameter k correspond the three
different possibilities for the curvature of space in this spacetime. A value of k=1
corresponds to constant positive curvature, k=0 to zero curvature and k=-1 to
constant negative curvature.

The time evolution of space is more complicated because it depends on the

equation of state of the stuff in spacetime. The equation of state is the
relationship between pressure and density in the stuff. Energy conservation plus
the equation of state determine how the energy density changes as space evolves
in time.

This is where vacuum energy becomes important. The energy densities for
matter, radiation and vacuum energy change with the size of space (the scale
factor a(t)) like

So as the Universe is getting bigger, the energy density from matter and
radiation would be getting smaller, but vacuum energy density would remain the
same. Another name for vacuum energy is the cosmological constant. A
cosmological constant eventually controls the time evolution of an expanding
universe, because its energy density stays the same while those of matter and
radiation are getting smaller.

In a spacetime with all three forms of energy present, the radiation part of the
mix will dominate the dynamics when the scale factor a(t)<<1. In the Big Bang
model this is called the radiation dominated era, and accounted for the first
10,000-100,000 years of the evolution of our Universe. Right now the dominant
forms of energy in our Universe are matter and vacuum energy.

That being said, we will avoid dealing with any vacuum energy right now and
consider a spacetime with only matter, with no radiation or cosmological
constant. In this case, the time evolution of space is related to the curvature of
space as follows:

k W Topology Time Evolution

1 >1 Closed Space is positively curved and finite,
expands from zero size to a maximum
size and then shrinks back to zero again
0 =1 Open Space is flat and infinite, and expands
forever
- <1 Open Space is negatively curved and infinite,
1 and expands forever

If the amount of energy density in the spacetime is over the critical density, so
that W > 1, then the fate of the Universe is to expand in a Big Bang but then
eventually contract back into a Big Crunch. Despite the fact that this would take
place on a time scale of billions of years, humans today find this possibility
philosophically undesirable. More importantly, the data do not support it.

The visible matter in the Universe observed by humans today has barely a
fraction of closure density. In fact, the Universe as observed today seems to have
barely a fraction of the mass needed to keep galaxies from flying apart, based on
the rotations of the stars in the galaxy about the galactic center.

What keeps the galaxies from flying apart? It must be a lot of mass that we
can't see. Which brings us to the subject of dark matter.

Dark matter

Something becomes visible when it interacts with light in such a way that we
can see it. Astronomers studying the motions of stars in spiral galaxies noticed
that the mean star velocity did not drop off with radius from the galactic center
as rapidly as the falloff in luminous mass in the galaxy dictated according to
Newtonian gravity. The stars far from the center
were rotating too fast to be balanced by the
gravitational force from the luminous mass
contained within that radius. This led to the
proposition that most of the mass in a galaxy was
low luminosity mass of some kind, and this invisible
mass was called dark matter.

Dark matter is probably not baryonic matter,

because the abundance of primordial elements such
as hydrogen, helium and deuterium would be much
higher if the Big Bang had produced enough baryon
density to account for the dark matter in galaxies.

The amount of dark matter present in the Universe has been estimated using
various techniques, including observing the velocities of galaxies in clusters and
calculating the gravitational mass of galactic clusters by their gravitational lensing
effects on surrounding spacetime. The end result is that the baryonic density WB
is about 5% and the dark matter density WD is about 30%

The leading candidate for dark matter right now comes from supersymmetry.
Supersymmetric versions of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics
contain heavy supersymmetric partners of the electroweak gauge bosons and the
Higgs field that are electrically neutral and hence don't interact with
electromagnetic radiation, aka light. These neutralinos, as they are called, are
fermionic partners of the neutral gauge bosons and the Higgs field. They would
have high mass, yet interact very weakly, and those two qualities make them a
good candidate for dark matter.

The Cosmological Constant

The observational evidence that the Universe was expanding didn't come
around until 1929, which was 14 years after the Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity was first published. The Einstein equations predicted an expanding
Universe for any kind of ordinary matter or radiation in existence.

There being no evidence yet to make people believe that the expanding
solutions to the Einstein equations represented observed physics, Einstein
postulated a new kind of energy density that could balance the matter density in
the Universe and prevent the Universe from expanding. This new theoretical
energy density is called the cosmological constant, known by the symbol L. The
energy density and pressure for L are

The Einstein equations with a matter density rm and cosmological constant L

become

A static solution has a(t) = constant = a0, which means that k=+1 and the
matter density, cosmological constant L0 and scale factor are related by

A cosmological constant alters the time evolution that is associated with a given
spatial curvature. The k=+1 spacetime with only matter expands and then
recollapses, but the k=+1 spacetime with matter and a cosmological constant can
either expand forever (for L > L0), stay the same forever (L = L0) or expand and
recontracts (0 < L < L0).

If L > 0 and k= 0 or -1, then space expands forever. If L < 0, then k=-1. When
k=-1 with matter and no cosmological constant, the Universe is open and
expands forever. But for L < 0, even though k=1 and the topology of space is
open, this spacetime expands and then recontracts like the k=+1 model with
matter and no cosmological constant.
What's the final answer?

1. Our Universe is pretty flat: The cosmic microwave background is the relic
of Big Bang thermal radiation, cooled to the temperature of 2.73° Kelvin.
But it didn't cool perfectly smoothly, and after the radiation cooled, there
were some lumps left over. The angular size of those lumps as observed
from our present location in spacetime depends on the spatial curvature of
the Universe. The currently observed lumpiness in the temperature of the
cosmic microwave background is just right for a flat Universe that expands
forever.

2. There is a cosmological constant: There is a vacuum energy, or

something that acts just like one, to make the Universe accelerate in time.
The acceleration of the Universe can be seen in the redshifts of distant
supernovae.

3. Most of the matter in the Universe is dark matter: Studies of galactic

motion show that ordinary visible matter in stars, galaxies, planets, and
interstellar gas only makes up a small fraction of the total energy density of
the Universe.

The Universe at our current epoch has (approximately)

So right now the density of vacuum energy in our Universe is only about twice as
large as the energy density from dark matter, with the contribution from visible
baryonic matter almost negligible. The total adds up to a flat universe which
should expand forever.

As far as we can tell, the expansion of the Universe started many billions of years
ago from a very hot, very small state. From that hot, small state, it
mushroomed and evolved into the Universe we know today. Cosmologists
call that process of expansion the Big Bang because at some phases,
especially in the beginning, the process was rather like an explosion.

Much of understanding the Big Bang is extrapolating between knowledge

of particle physics today, and projections from the mathematical model of
an expanding universe in general relativity. The Einstein equations give us
a mathematical model for describing how fast the Universe would
expanding at what size and time, given the energy density of matter and
radiation at that time. We base our guesses about the matter and
radiation density of the early Universe based on the ancient light reaching us
from the past in our night skies, and what we have learned about elementary
particle physics, through theory and experiment.
The Planck Era and the Inflation Era

TIME: Planck time, about 10-43 seconds

At this stage of the Universe's evolution, if string theory is right, then there's not
much point to talking about the geometry or temperature of the Universe. We
know from duality relations between string theories that spacetime geometry is
not fundamental, but emerges as we zoom out to distance scales larger than the
Planck length. Physics at the Planck scale may be literally unknowable. But this is
still work in progress. We'll keep you posted on later developments.

Some time after the Planck era, cosmologists believe there was a period called
Inflation, which is discussed in another section. The inflationary era is a little
easier to pin down theoretically than is the Planck era, but even so, the
theoretical physics concerning these two periods in the history of our Universe is
still in a state of flux.

In honor of that fact, we represent the Planck era and inflationary era together by
a Universe filled with questions.

Radiation fills the Universe

TIME: between 10-12 and 10-10 seconds

This is where the Big Bang officially begins. Somehow at the end of the
inflationary era, the Universe was left in a small, hot, dense quantum state. The
so-called vacuum energy of the quantum fields changes into a seething soup of
photons, gluons and other elementary particles. In the Einstein equations of
general relativity, the expansion of the Universe can be driven by energy density
in the form of matter and radiation. During the first phase of the Big bang, the
radiation part of the energy density is so much bigger than the matter part of the
energy density that we can forget matter exists, at least for a while.

Quarks outnumber antiquarks

TIME: 10-11 seconds

At this stage of the Big Bang, the tiny expanding Universe is filled with radiation
creating pairs of particles and antiparticles, and pairs of particles and antiparticles
annihilating back into radiation.

We know from observing elementary particles in the present era that every
known particle has an antiparticle with the opposite charge and the same spin.
(Particles with zero charge are their own antiparticles.) The antiparticle of a
quark is called an antiquark. At the beginning of the Big Bang, the Universe was
so hot that quarks and antiquarks were created from radiation and annihilated
back into radiation at a high rate. There was an equal number of quarks and
antiquarks on the average at any one moment.

But as the Universe expanded, it cooled, and the cooler radiation was less likely
to create quark-antiquark pairs. As quarks and antiquarks "froze" out of the
radiation background, a greater number of quarks than
antiquarks was left over.
 We know this must have happened, because we observe more quarks than
antiquarks today. All of the protons and neutrons in all of the elements in the
Universe are made out of quarks, not antiquarks. Quarks are clearly more
numerous than antiquarks.

But this quark excess can't be explained using the Standard Model of particle
physics. Therefore the domination of quarks over antiquarks is an area where
studies of the early Universe could shed light on particle physics we haven't yet
been able to study by direct particle scattering in an accelerator.

Weak nuclear bosons become massive

TIME: 10-10 seconds

At this stage of expansion and cooling of the Universe, the average particle
energy is dropping to the typical energy scale of the weak nuclear force, and
something dramatic happens to the particles that transmit the weak nuclear
force.

In elementary particle physics, we have learned that the bosons that transmit
the weak nuclear force (as in nuclear fission) are very heavy, and that they gain
their large mass through a process known as spontaneous symmetry
breaking. This process occurs at some definite energy scale, at the energy of the
weak nuclear force. Above that energy scale, the weak nuclear bosons are
massless like the photon that transmits the electromagnetic force between
electrons and protons and the gluon that transmits the strong nuclear force
between quarks. Below that energy scale, the weak bosons are big and heavy,
and so the weak nuclear force only acts over a very small distance scale, about
10-16 centimeters, about one thousandth the size of a nucleus.

For this reason, cosmologists believe that when the Universe was so hot that the
average energy of the radiation is above the energy of the weak nuclear force,
the weak nuclear bosons were massless and the weak nuclear force had an
infinite range like that of the photons and gluons. But as the Universe expanded
and cooled, the average energy dropped to the level where spontaneous
symmetry breaking occurred, and weak nuclear bosons gained mass. This slowed
them down and restricted their force to a small range.

Quarks and gluons are confined

TIME: 10-4 seconds

The Universe has now expanded and cooled to the point where something
incredible happens to the quarks and gluons that are popping around at high
speed by themselves. They undergo an enormous Universe-wide phase
transformation where all of the quarks and gluons in the Universe become
confined together inside mesons such as the pi meson and baryons such as the
proton and neutron. Prior to this era, protons and neutrons and mesons don't
exist, there is just a hot soup of quarks and gluons in their place.

Actually, to be honest, particle physicists have only measured quarks and gluons
that are trapped inside baryons and mesons. Nobody has ever measured a quark
or a gluon zipping around freely on its own. In the theory of quarks and gluons,
called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD for short), it is believed there is a
phase transition at high temperature where quarks and gluons become
deconfined and can and do zip around freely by themselves.

The details of this deconfinement transition are still not well understood, even in
the theory. However, judging by the past successes of theoretical particle physics
in predicting phenomena that were later observed, it's probably a safe bet to say
that as the Universe cooled to a temperature below the deconfinement
temperature of QCD, quarks and gluons were no longer able to zip around on
their own and became confined together into the mesons and baryons that
produced the Universe we see today.

Proton to neutron ratio is fixed

TIME: 1 second

Prior to this era of the Universe, neutrons and protons were rapidly changing into
each other through the emission and absorption of neutrinos. Now the Universe
has expanded and cooled to the point where that process slows down, and at the
end of the slowing down, we are left with about seven protons for every neutron.

How does this happen? Particle physicists have known for a long time that a
neutron just sitting around will all by itself decay into a proton, an electron and
an electron antineutrino, but a proton won't decay into anything. (This process is
illustrated in the animation above.) If we hit a proton with a electron antineutrino
at high enough energy, we can make a neutron and a positron (an antielectron)
come out the other end. And if we hit a proton with an electron, we get a neutron
and an electron neutrino at the other end. So neutrons change into protons by
themelves, but the reverse process requires extra energy from some kind of
collision.

When the Universe was sufficiently hot and dense, there were so many electrons
and antineutrinos hitting protons and changing them into neutrons that an equal
numbers of protons and neutrons are changing into each other at the same rate.

However, as the Universe kept expanding and cooling, the average energy level
of the particles dropped and so did the rate of neutrinos hitting protons and
changing them into neutrons. The neutrinos and antineutrinos decoupled from
the rest of the matter and radiation, and interactions between neutrinos and
other particles stopped being a very big factor in the dynamics of the Universe.

So the protons were no longer being changed to neutrons, but the neutrons were
still changing spontaneously all by themselves into protons. That eventually left
us with about seven times more protons than neutrons in the Universe.

To make a hydrogen nucleus, we only need one proton, no neutrons. To make a

helium nucleus, we need two protons and two neutrons. Therefore, a direct
consequence of an excess of protons over neutrons would be an excess of
hydrogen over helium, and that is what is observed [Link] gives us a vital
observational validation for the Big Bang theoretical description of the early
expanding Universe.

Protons and neutrons form nuclei

TIME: 100 seconds

At this point in the expansion and cooling of the Universe, the average
temperature is low enough so that neutrons and protons can stick together and
make nuclei of the lighter elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium.
Physicists call this process nucleosynthesis, and it had to occur before the
structures we observed today, such as atoms and molecules, could exist.

Neutrons and protons only attract each other at very short distances, less than
10-13 centimeters. The strong nuclear force that holds them together is confined
and cancels out at larger distances. So in order to form nuclei, neutrons and
protons have to spend some time in very close proximity to one another. This
can't happen if the temperature is too high, because then the protons and
neutrons will be moving too fast to spend much time near one another.

The majority of the neutrons in the Universe wind up stuck in combinations of

two protons, two neutrons, in the helium nucleus. A few neutrons contribute to
lithium, with three protons and three neutrons, and the leftovers wind up in
deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron.

Nucleosynthesis sets the stage for the formation of atoms and then galaxies and
stars.

Matter dominates over radiation

TIME: 10,000 years

As usual, the Universe is still cooling and expanding. But as this happens, more
and more matter is being created by the high energy radiation. And as the
Universe expands, the matter loses less energy than does the radiation.

Eventually, the energy density in the matter -- mostly in the newly-formed nuclei
-- becomes larger than the energy density in radiation, in massless or nearly
massless particles, mainly photons. This means that in the equations of relativity
that described cosmic expansion, the number representing the energy density of
matter becomes much bigger than the number that represents the energy density
of radiation, and we can forget about the radiation in those equations and only
concentrate on what happens to the matter. The matter then dominates in
determining us how the Universe expands from this era on.

At the end of this process, photons scatter much more with each other than they
do with matter. As a result, the energy exchange between matter and radiation
becomes less efficient. The photons thermalize and start behaving as thermal
black body radiation. We can measure this cosmic background radiation
today.

After having cooled off for many billions of years, the temperature of this
radiation is just a few degrees above absolute zero. But we can measure this
temperature, and we can also measure how this temperature of the cosmic
background radiation varies with direction in the Universe. This tells us important
details about the Big Bang and about particle physics as well.

Protons and electrons form hydrogen

TIME: 500,000 years

By this time there are plenty of protons and other light nuclei in the universe, and
there are also plenty of electrons. But until now, the Universe has been too hot
and dense for the electrons to be captured for very long by a nucleus, without
being smacked out of orbit by collisions with other particles.

When the temperature of the Universe cools to the point where the average
speed of an average electron isn't high enough to escape capture by a proton,
then atoms start to form. Since the only nuclei that exist are hydrogen, helium
and lithium, the first atoms to exist are therefore hydrogen, helium and lithium.

The heavier elements, such as carbon which is necessary for life as we know it to
evolve, are created in a much more interesting manner.

Hydrogen gas makes first stars

TIME: one billion years

Now that the radiation has cooled and decoupled from the matter, and almost all
the electrons are bound up to nuclei in hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms,
gravitational forces become important. Small fluctuations in the matter density
and gravitational field begin to grow and coalesce. Hydrogen gas is pulled
together by gravity until the force causes the gas to collapse and ignite through
hydrogen fusion to form the first stars.

Stars produce heavier elements

TIME: 2-13 billion years

When stars first began to form and galaxies took shape, hydrogen, helium and
lithium were basically the only three elements in the Universe. The heavier
elements come from inside stars. Stars consume hydrogen and create heavier
elements through the process of nuclear fusion. All the elements in the Universe
today that are heavier than lithium come from the inside of stars.

How did these elements get outside the stars? The diagram above is slightly
misleading. The heavy elements don't just leap from the insides of the stars
where they were made. The heavier elements we see in the world today were all
ejected from stars that had reached the end of their lifespan and exploded into
supernovas before settling into old age as a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black
hole.

The process of making the heavy elements and then ejecting them into the
Universe takes place over a time scale that is the lifespan of a star. That's why
the time scale here runs from 2 billion to 13 billion years.

Life evolves

TIME: check your local TV Guide

And here we are, conscious beings able to seek out information about our
Universe, and use it to entertain ourselves.

The future of our Universe?

TIME: billions of years from now

Are we the only ones? We don't know how probable life is in the Universe. The
problem is, we probably don't have an infinite amount of time to find out. The
latest observations of very old galactic clusters, combined with measurements
from supernovas, seem to indicate that the Universe is going to keep on
expanding and cooling forever.

Eventually the stars will burn all of their hydrogen, and things could get really
cold and boring.

Until then, it doesn't hurt to try to figure out whether the evolution of life has
occurred anywhere else in the Universe. However, string theory is pretty
irrelevant to that question. So this is where we'll stop.

Black Holes
Try to jump so high that you fly right off of the Earth into outer space. What
happens? Why don't you get very far? The gravitational force pulls you back down
again very quickly. You could jump much higher on Mars, still higher on the
moon, because they're both less massive than the Earth. The strength of gravity
at the surface of the moon is only 1/6 the strength of gravity at the surface of the
Earth.

A gigantic black hole surrounded by a dust cloud in the center of a distant

galaxy, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope

You are essentially trapped on Earth, unless you can find a rocket that can
travel at escape velocity away from the Earth. This is how our space program
works. If you shoot something fast enough, it can escape gravity and make it to
outer space.

But hold the phone -- there's supposedly a maximum speed in the Universe,
the speed of light. What happens if the escape velocity of a planet were greater
than the speed of light? In other words, what if gravity were strong enough to
trap light itself?

Then you'd have yourself a black hole. A black hole is a gravitating object
whose gravitational field is so strong that light cannot escape. The event
horizon is where light loses the ability to escape from the black hole. Nothing
that goes inside the event horizon can ever get back out again, not even light.

Black holes can be created by the gravitational collapse of large stars that
are at least twice as massive as our Sun. Normally, stars balance the
gravitational force with the pressure from the nuclear fusion reactions inside.
When a star gets old and burns up all of its hydrogen into helium and then turns
the helium into heavier elements like iron and nickel, it can have three fates. The
first two fates occur for stars less than about twice the mass of our Sun (and one
of them will be our Sun's eventual fate). These two fates both depend on the
fermionic repulsion pressure described by quantum mechanics -- two fermions
cannot be in the same quantum state at the same time. This means that the two
stable destinies for a collapsing star will be:

1. a white dwarf supported by the fermionic repulsion pressure of the electrons

in the heavy atoms in the core

2. a neutron star supported by the fermionic repulsion pressure of the neutrons

in the nuclei of the heavy atoms in the core

If the mass of the collapsing star is too large, bigger than twice the mass of
our Sun, the fermionic repulsion pressure of either the electrons or the neutrons
is not strong enough to prevent the ultimate gravitational collapse into a black
hole.

The estimated age of the Universe is several times the lifespan of an average
star. This means there must have been a lot of stars bigger than twice the mass
of our Sun that have burned their hydrogen and collapsed since the Universe
began. Our Universe ought to contain many black holes, if the model that
astrophysicists use to describe their formation is correct. Black holes created by
the collapse of individual stars should only be about 2 to 100 times as massive as
our Sun.

Another way that black holes can be created is the gravitational collapse of the
center of a large cluster of stars. These types of black holes can be very much
more massive than our Sun. There may be one of them in the center of every
galaxy, including our galaxy, the Milky Way. The black hole shown above sits in
the middle of the galaxy called NGC 7052, surrounded by a bright cloud of dust
3,700 light-years in diameter. The mass of this black hole is 300 million times
the mass of our Sun.

Try to jump so high that you fly right off of the Earth into outer space. What
happens? Why don't you get very far? You are essentially trapped on Earth,
unless you can find a rocket that can travel at escape velocity away from the
Earth.

The escape velocity can be calculated in Newtonian gravity by using energy

conservation of an object of mass m in the gravitational field of a planet of mass
M in D space dimensions:
 The escape velocity for the surface of the Earth is about 11 km/sec. Notice
that's only 37 millionths of the speed of light. Under what conditions would the
escape velocity from the surface of some planet or star be equal to the speed of
light?

For a planet the mass of the Earth, this distance is only about a centimeter. So if
the Earth were less than a centimeter in diameter, the escape velocity at the
surface would be greater than the speed of light.

But thanks to Einstein we learned that when any velocity in a gravitating

system approaches the speed of light, the Newtonian theory of gravity has to be
put aside for the relativistically invariance theory of Einstein. The relativistic
formulation of gravity in General Relativity starts with the Einstein equation
relating the curvature of the spacetime geometry to the energy of the matter and
radiation in the spacetime

The solution to the Einstein equations for the spacetime around a planet or star of
mass M is called the Schwarzschild metric

(This is for d=4 spacetime dimensions. Can you guess from the Newtonian limit
for D space dimensions what the Schwarzschild metric looks like for d spacetime
dimensions?) In units where Newton's constant and the speed of light are both
set to unity, the gravitational radius RG can be written

Note that an assumption has been made that we are outside the gravitating
body in question. If we're outside the body, and the radial size R of the body
satisfies R>RG, then we don't need to know about what happens at coordinate
r=RG because this metric doesn't apply to r<R.

If R<RG, we have to face the problem of what happens when r=RG. The metric
looks singular there, but actually the spacetime is smooth, so that an observer
falling into the body's gravitational pull from r>RG to r<RG won't feel anything
special.

But the problem is: such an observer will never, under any circumstances, not
even with the most powerful rocket in the world, ever be able to cross back to
r>RG.
 In this case, this gravitating body is called a black hole, and at the coordinate
value r=RG, there exists something called a black hole event horizon. The event
horizon is the relativistic geometric expression of the escape velocity becoming
equal to the speed of light. Once anything, even light, crosses the event horizon,
it can never escape back out to r>RG again.

Black holes can be created by the gravitational collapse of large stars that
are at least twice as massive as our Sun. Normally, stars balance the
gravitational force with the pressure from the nuclear fusion reactions inside.
When a star gets old and burns up all of its hydrogen into helium and then turns
the helium into heavier elements like iron and nickel, it can have three fates. The
first two fates occur for stars less than about twice the mass of our Sun (and one
of them will be our Sun's eventual fate). These two fates both depend on the
fermionic repulsion pressure described by quantum mechanics -- two fermions
cannot be in the same quantum state at the same time. This means that the two
stable destinies for a collapsing star will be:

1. a white dwarf supported by the fermionic repulsion pressure of the electrons

in the heavy atoms in the core

2. a neutron star supported by the fermionic repulsion pressure of the neutrons

in the nuclei of the heavy atoms in the core

If the mass of the collapsing star is too large, bigger than twice the mass of
our Sun, the fermionic repulsion pressure of either the electrons or the neutrons
is not strong enough to prevent the ultimate gravitational collapse into a black
hole.

The estimated age of the Universe is several times the lifespan of an average
star. This means there must have been a lot of stars bigger than twice the mass
of our Sun that have burned their hydrogen and collapsed since the Universe
began. Our Universe ought to contain many black holes, if the model that
astrophysicists use to describe their formation is correct. Black holes created by
the collapse of individual stars should only be about 2 to 100 times as massive as
our Sun.

Another way that black holes can be created is the gravitational collapse of the
center of a large cluster of stars. These types of black holes can be very much
more massive than our Sun. There may be one of them in the center of every
galaxy, including our galaxy, the Milky Way. The black hole shown above sits in
the middle of the galaxy called NGC 7052, surrounded by a bright cloud of dust
3,700 light-years in diameter. The mass of this black hole is about 300 million
times the mass of our Sun.

Since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, there have been
many observations of what are believed to be black holes, including the
photograph below of a suspected black hole in the heart of the galaxy NGC 6251.
But the subject of black holes began in theoretical physics, long before there were
any observations by astronomers.
 The advent of Einstein's General Theory
of Relativity gave physicists a mathematical
language for describing the gravitational force
in a manner consistent with the constant speed
of light. Most of what we believe we know
about black holes has come from abstract
theoretical models in general relativity.

But in order to observe black holes in Nature

we need to know how those abstract theoretical
models translate to a Universe filled with other
stuff.

A black hole unobscured by dust

Abstract theoretical black holes

In the abstract theoretical model of black holes, a black hole is studied as if it

were the only thing in the Universe. Using that approximation, the math of
general relativity becomes doable, and we can make predictions about black hole
behavior that are useful in understanding the black holes we see. In addition, we
learn a lot of things about black holes mathematically that we may never get a
chance to witness directly through observation.

In general relativity, the paths of light can be calculated for many different
distributions of matter and energy using equations call the geodesic equations.
The geodesic equations give us the paths that would be followed by freely-
falling test particles. For example, a baseball after being hit by Sammy Sosa
and before being caught by an eager fan would be a freely falling particle,
travelling on a geodesic path through spacetime.

Light travels on geodesics paths through spacetime. When those geodesic

paths cross the event horizon of a black hole, they never come back out.
Interestingly, in a Universe where the energy density is never negative, this
behavior of light leads mathematically to two very crucial properties of black
holes:

 The surface area of the event horizon of a black hole can only increase,
never decrease. This also means that although two black holes can join to
make a bigger black hole, one black hole can never split in two.
 The pull of gravity at the event horizon is constant; it has the same
value everywhere on the event horizon.

Note that according to the first property, it is impossible for black holes to
decay and go away, because a black hole cannot get smaller or split into smaller
black holes. This is going to be changed when we add quantum mechanics to the
theory in the next section.
Observable astrophysical black holes

If a black hole traps all the light that crosses the event horizon, then how can
we ever hope to observe one?

In the abstract theoretical model of a black hole, it sits alone forever in the
Universe letting us do math on it. In the Nature we observe, the Universe is filled
with dust and gas in addition to stars, planets and galaxies. When dust and gas
fall into a black hole, they can be sucked towards the event horizon so fast that
the atoms are ionized and release bright light that escapes without crossing the
event horizon.

So the way astronomers and astrophysicists detect black holes in astronomical

observations is to look for light from ionized dust and gas being sucked into
something so fast that it could only be a black hole, not a normal gravitating
massive object like a star.

However, this bright light can be hard to see, because most black holes also
attract giant clouds of interstellar dust that hide many of their features, as shown
on the previous page. The suspected black hole shown in the photo above has a
warped dust cloud around it, so that the bright light from the ionized gas can be
seen.

Since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, there have been many
observations of what are believed to be black holes, including the photograph
below of a suspected black hole in the heart of the galaxy NGC 6251.
But the study of black holes began in theoretical physics long before there
were any observations of these objects by astronomers. Not just an interesting
physical phenomenon, black holes are extreme geometrical objects with
fascinating mathematical properties that have posed serious challenges to the
foundations of classical and quantum physics.

Black hole geometry

What makes a black hole so special is the extreme effect it has on the
propagation of light. Suppose we have a black hole spacetime described in
general relativity by some set of coordinates {xa} and some metric tensor gab.
The paths of light rays are described by null (i.e. lightlike) geodesics, which are
computed using the geodesic equation

where Da is the covariant derivative for the metric gab and

is the tangent vector to the null geodesic in question, and t is the distance
parameter along the geodesic, the analog of time along a ray of light.

The possible transverse (orthogonal to the propagation direction) deformations

of a bundle of null geodesics can be reduced to three types: the expansion q,
rotation wab and shear sab, computed as the trace, antisymmetric part and
symmetric part, respectively, of the covariant derivative of the geodesic tangent
vector

Taking the derivative of the expansion q along a null geodesic leads to what is
called the focusing equation

If we're in a spacetime with no rotation, and the matter and energy density is
positive, then we arrive at a very important inequality for q that is the key to all
the mysterious and interesting properties of black holes:

The quantity q measures how light rays expand or converge, in other words q
measures the focusing of light by gravity. According to our sign convention, if q is
negative, it means the light rays are being focused together instead of spread
apart by the spacetime geometry. The above inequality tells us that once light
rays start being converged by gravity with some value q0<0, then in a finite
distance along the light ray, nearby light rays will be focused to a point, such that
they cross each other with zero transverse area A

This is bad news if these light rays all emanated from a single source, because
it means the light is being infinitely focused into a singularity, and the concept of
a geodesic has broken down. When q turns negative for both "incoming" and
"outgoing" light rays, it means that the light has been trapped, that the escape
velocity from that gravitational field has become greater than the speed of light.

When q is zero or negative for both incoming and outgoing null geodesics
orthogonal to a smooth spacelike surface, that surface is called a trapped surface,
and any closed trapped surface must lie inside a black hole. This an abstract
general definition of a black hole that is independent of any coordinate system
used to describe it. Gravity bends light like a lens, and a black hole can be
thought of as a very peculiar type of lens, one that bends light so that it can
never be seen.

Black holes have four very important properties which have become known as
the Four Laws of Black Hole Physics of classical general relativity.

The Four Laws of Black Hole Physics

0 The surface gravity k at the event horizon is
constant: it has the same value everywhere on the
event horizon.
1 The change in mass of a black hole is proportional to
 the surface gravity times the change in area.
dM = (k/8p) dA
2 The surface area of the event horizon of a black
hole can only increase, never decrease. (This
means that two black holes can join to make a bigger
black hole, but one black hole can never split in two.)
3 It is impossible to lower the surface gravity k at the
event horizon to zero through any physical process.

Note that according to the second law property, it is impossible for black holes
to decay and go away, because a black hole cannot get smaller or split into
smaller black holes. This is going to be changed when we add quantum
mechanics to the theory in the next section.

If these laws look familiar somehow, there's a good reason. This is a

tremendously important similarity that will also be discussed in the next section.

The Singularity Within

The problem with the type of focusing of light that defines the presence of a
black hole is that once it starts, the focusing equation says that it ends in utter
disaster. Once a bundle of null geodesics becomes trapped by crossing to q<0,
within a finite distance along each geodesic, q> -Infinity, the geodesics will cross
at a point, and the transverse area of the bundle will go to zero. When this
happens, the necessary conditions for the existence and uniqueness of these
geodesics are violated, and it's no longer possible to use the geodesic equations
to predict what happens to the geodesics after they cross.

The spacetime will then exhibit one of the two possible behaviors:

1. The spacetime curvature in this region remains finite for all observers, but
notion of predictability for the spacetime breaks down, and evolution of the
spacetime can no longer be uniquely predicted from a set of initial data.

2. The spacetime curvature in this region becomes infinite for all or some
observers, so that there simply is no possibility of extending geodesics past the
point where they cross, they simply end there. The spacetime as a whole retains
its predictability but the region contains a spacetime singularity where the paths
of observers simply end their existence, and spacetime itself can no longer be
defined.

Is there a Cosmic Censor?

So gravity can focus light so powerfully that it can spontaneously end the
existence of observers, destroy the definition of the spacetime itself, or spoil the
unique time evolution in a spacetime based on a sensible set of initial data? What
is to protect us then from the pathological possibilities of strong gravitation
fields?

The Cosmic Censorship Conjecture proposes that in the context of the theory
of general relativity, in a spacetime where the total energy density is positive,
pathologies such as spacetime singularities and breakdowns in causality and
predictability are always hidden behind the event horizons of black holes
 In the previous section the two main classical properties of black holes -- the
total area of event horizons can only increase, and the surface gravity is constant
over each event horizon. We call these classical properties because they were
discovered by solving the Einstein equations, which are equations that do not
use quantum mechanics.

What happens when we add quantum mechanics to the analysis of classical

black holes?
The easiest way to combine quantum mechanics with classical general
relativity is to look at particle scattering in curved spacetime, where the
spacetime curvature can't react to the scattering quantum particles. This is a bit
of a fake, because we're keeping the gravity part classical and only using
quantum physics for the particles. But even so, stuff happens that is very
astounding and important to the theory of black holes.

Black holes decay!

Theoretical physicists who studied quantum particle scattering in a curved

spacetime discovered that the definition of particle and antiparticle depends on
the observer, which is against the usual rules of the theory of general relativity.
The implication of this is that the number of particles being counted depends also
on the observer

The picture that emerged from all of these studies is that if a physicist were
tossed into a black hole, he wouldn't see anything special happen at the event
horizon. He would just be crushed by the huge gravitational forces at the center.
However if he were held just outside the event horizon by a rope attached to his
thumbs, his toes would be burning from a hot soup of particles being emitted
from the black hole.

But how can particles get out of the black hole? Even light can't get out of a
black hole. (Light is made of massless particles, and if massless particles can't
escape, then neither can the particles with nonzero mass.)

In classical black hole physics, the event horizon is an absolute barrier to

everything trying to get back outside. However, quantum mechanics brings with
it quantum uncertainty, and quantum vacuum fluctuations where particle-
antiparticle pairs are always being created, then destroying one another,
virtually, in the vacuum.

In the animation above, P stands for particle and A stands for antiparticle. A
particle-antiparticle pair is created for a brief instance just outside the black hole
event horizon. Before the pair can destroy one another as usual, the antiparticle
is sucked behind the event horizon, while the particle is ejected in the opposite
direction. (Or vice versa.)

According to the physicist observing the event horizon by hanging from a rope
by his thumbs, the black hole has emitted a particle through the event horizon.
To a distant observer, the black hole's mass has now decreased by the mass of
the emitted particle, and the area of the event horizon has gotten smaller!

But how can this happen? This means that the total area of black holes can
and will decrease in time, and black holes can decay, contrary to the classical
prediction using the Einstein equations and neglecting quantum physics.
Where are the quantum microstates?

Not only does the black hole decay, but the particles it spits out when it decays
have a thermal distribution. These decaying black holes start to look like
thermal objects that classical physicists have studied in thermodynamics since
the 19th century.

But in the 20th century, in the quantum revolution, it was discovered that all
19th century classical thermodynamics could be described as the bulk limit of
sums of quantum microstates. The thermodynamics of steam power plants
reduced to understanding the quantum microstates of water and air molecules,
for example.

So then, what are the quantum microstates that give rise to black hole
thermodynamics?

String theorists believe they have the answer.

If the Four Laws of Black Hole Physics looked familiar, it's because they sound
just like the Four Laws of Thermodynamics, which are:

The Four Laws of Thermodynamics

0 The temperature T of a system in thermal
equilibrium has the same value everywhere in the
system.
1 The change in energy of a system is proportional to
the temperature times the change in entropy.
dE = T dS
2 The total entropy of a system can only increase,
never decrease.
3 It is impossible to lower the temperature T of a
system to zero through any physical process.

There seems to be a direct correspondence between the properties of a classical

thermodynamic system, and the properties of a black hole, shown in the table
below

Thermodynamic system Black hole

temperature surface gravity at horizon
energy black hole mass
entropy area of horizon

A black hole spacetime seems to behave like a thermodynamic system. How

could this be true? This is spacetime geometry, after all, not a cylinder of gas or a
pot of liquid. The importance of this apparent thermodynamic behavior of black
holes was made undeniable when black hole radiation was discovered by
Hawking.

Black hole radiation, known as Hawking radiation, comes about because

relativistic quantum field theory is invariant under Lorentz transformations, but
not under general coordinate transformations. In flat spacetime, two observers
moving at a constant velocity relative to one another will agree on what
constitutes a vacuum state, but if one observer is accelerating relative to the
other, then the vacuum states defined by the two observers will differ. This idea,
when extended to the spacetime of a black hole, leads to the conclusion that to
an observer who stays at a fixed distance from a black hole event horizon, the
black hole appears to radiate particles with a thermal spectrum with temperature
(in units with GN=c=1) T=1/8pMkB, where kB is Boltzmann's constant and M is the
black hole mass.

Since plane waves and Fourier transforms are at the heart of relativistic
quantum field theory, this effect can be illustrated using a classical plane wave,
without even appealing to quantum operators. Consider a simple monochromatic
plane wave in two spacetime dimensions with the form

An observer traveling in the x-direction with constant velocity b perceives this

plane wave as being monochromatic but the frequency w is Doppler-shifted:

An observer traveling in the x-direction with constant acceleration a does not

perceive this plane wave as being monochromatic. The accelerated observer sees
a complicated waveform:

This wave as perceived by the accelerated observer is a superposition of

monochromatic waves of frequency n with a distribution function f(v) that, as
shown below

appears to be a thermal distribution with temperature T=a/2pkB. The result

from this simple example matches Hawking's black hole result if the acceleration
is related to the black hole mass by a=1/4M. And indeed, the acceleration at the
event horizon of a black hole of mass M does satisfy a=1/4M. Why does this work
so well? Because an observer held at a fixed distance from the event horizon of a
black hole sees a coordinate system that is almost identical to that of an observer
undergoing constant acceleration in flat spacetime.

But don't be misled by this to think that the full black hole radiation calculation
is as simple. We've neglected to mention the details because they are very
complicated and involve the global causal structure of a black hole spacetime.

Conservation of energy still applies to this system as a whole, so if an observer

at a fixed distance sees a hot bath of particles being radiated by the black hole,
then the black hole must be losing mass by an appropriate amount. Hence a
black hole can decrease in area, through Hawking radiation, through quantum
processes.

But if area is like entropy, and the area can decrease, doesn't that mean that
the entropy of a black hole can therefore decrease, in violation of the Second Law
of thermodynamics? No -- because the radiated particles also carry entropy, and
the total entropy of the black hole and radiation always increases.

Where does the entropy come from?

One of the great achievements of quantum mechanics in the 20th century was
explaining the microscopic basis of the thermodynamic behavior of macroscopic
systems that were understood in the 19th century. The quantum revolution
began when Planck tried to explain the thermal behavior of light, and came up
with the concept of a quantum of light. The thermodynamic properties of gases
are now well understood in terms of the quantized energy states of their
constituent atoms and molecules.

So what is the microscopic physics that underlies the thermodynamic

properties of black holes? String theory suggests an answer that we will explain in
the next section.

If string theory is a theory of gravity, then how does it compare with Einstein's
theory of gravity? What is the relationship between strings and spacetime
geometry?

Strings and gravitons

The simplest case to imagine is a single string traveling in a flat spacetime in d

dimensions, meaning that it is traveling across space while time is ticking, so to
speak. A string is a one-dimensional object, meaning that if you want to travel
along a string, you can only go forwards or backwards in the direction of the
string, there is no sideways or up and down on a string. The string can move
sideways or up and down in spacetime, though, and as the string moves around
in spacetime, it sweeps out a surface in spacetime called the string worldsheet, a
two-dimensional surface with one dimension of space and one dimension of time.

The string worldsheet is the key to all the physics of the string. A string
oscillates as it travels through the d-dimensional spacetime. Those oscillations
can be viewed from the two-dimensional string worldsheet point of view as
oscillations in a two-dimensional quantum gravity theory. In order to make those
quantized oscillations consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity,
the number of spacetime dimensions has to be restricted to 26 in the case of a
theory with only forces (bosons), and 10 dimensions if there are both forces and
matter (bosons and fermions) in the particle spectrum of the theory.

So where does gravity come in?

If the string traveling through spacetime is a closed string, then the spectrum
of oscillations includes a particle with 2 units of spin and zero mass, with the right
type of interactions to be the graviton, the particle that is the carrier of the
gravitational force.

Where there are gravitons, then there must be gravity. Where is the gravity in
string theory?

Strings and spacetime geometry

The classical theory of spacetime geometry that we call gravity consists of the
Einstein equation, which relates the curvature of spacetime to the distribution of
matter and energy in spacetime. But how do the Einstein equations come out of
string theory?

If a closed string is traveling in a curved spacetime, then the coordinates of

the string in spacetime feel this curvature as the string propagates. Once again,
the answer lies on the string worldsheet. In order for their to be a consistent
quantum theory in this case, the curved space in which the string travels must be
a solution to the Einstein equations.

Now this is really something! This was a very convincing result for string
theorists. Not only does string theory predict the graviton from flat spacetime
physics alone, but string theory also predicts the Einstein equation will be obeyed
by a curved spacetime in which strings propagate.

What about strings and black holes?

Black holes are solutions to the Einstein equation, therefore string theories
that contain gravity also predict the existence of black holes. But string theories
give rise to more interesting symmetries and types of matter than are commonly
assumed in ordinary Einstein relativity. So black holes are more interesting to
study in the context of string theory, because there are more kinds to study.

Is spacetime fundamental?

Note that there is a complication in the relationship between strings and

spacetime. String theory does not predict that the Einstein equations are obeyed
exactly. String theory adds an infinite series of corrections to the theory of
gravity. Under normal circumstances, if we only look at distance scales much
larger than a string, then these corrections are not measurable. But as the
distance scale gets smaller, these corrections become larger until the Einstein
equation no longer adequately describes the result.

In fact, when these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime

geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result. The equations for determining
the spacetime geometry become impossible to solve except under very strict
symmetry conditions, such as unbroken supersymmetry, where the large
correction terms can be made to vanish or cancel each other out.
 This is a hint that perhaps spacetime geometry is not something fundamental
in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large distance
scales or weak coupling. This is an idea with enormous philosophical implications.

If string theory is a theory of gravity, then what is the relationship between

strings, gravitons and spacetime geometry?

Strings and gravitons

The simplest case to imagine is a single string traveling in a flat spacetime in d

dimensions. As the string moves around in spacetime, it sweeps out a surface in
spacetime called the string worldsheet, a two-dimensional surface with one
dimension of space (s) and one dimension of time (t).

There are many ways to examine this string theory. One way is to expand the
string coordinates Xa(s,t) into oscillator modes and demand spacetime Lorentz
invariance and the absence of negative norm states. A different way to examine
the string theory is through the field theory defined on the worldsheet, which is
described by the action

where hmn is the metric on the worldsheet, R(2) is the curvature of the worldsheet,
and F is a scalar field called the dilaton. The consistency condition for string
theory when described in this manner is that the field theory on the worldsheet
satisfy the condition for scale invariance, also known as conformal
invariance. The set of functions that describe the scaling properties of quantum
fields are called the beta functions. String worldsheet physics is invariant under a
change in scale if the beta function bF for the dilaton field F vanishes, which
happens when d=26 for bosonic strings.

(For superstring theories, conformal invariance is replaced by superconformal

invariance, and the required spacetime dimension is 10.)

The spacetime oscillation spectrum satisfies Lorentz invariance in 26

dimensions, so that these string oscillations on the worldsheet can be classified
by the spacetime properties of mass and spin, just like elementary particles. A
theory based on open strings has massless oscillations that are Lorentz vectors,
with spin 1. A closed string theory is like a product of two open string theories,
with an oscillation mode that travels in spacetime as a two index symmetric
tensor, with spin 2.

This mode with spin 2 propagates like as small fluctuation in the gravitational
field propagates according to general relativity. This string oscillation mode
should then be the graviton, the particle that mediates the gravitational force.
The presence of this spin 2 oscillation mode was the first clue that string theory
was not a theory of strong interactions, but a potential quantum theory of
gravity.
Strings and spacetime geometry

In string theory, if we start with flat spacetime, we see gravitons in the

spectrum, and therefore we deduce that gravity must exist. But if gravity exists,
then spacetime must be curved and not flat. How do the Einstein equations for
the curvature of spacetime come out of string theory?

If a closed string is traveling in a curved spacetime with metric field gab(X) ,

then the string worldsheet theory looks like

The spacetime metric gab(X) enters the two-dimensional theory on the string
worldsheet as a matrix of nonlinear couplings between the Xa(s,t).

Once again, the goal of conformal invariance is met by demanding that the
beta functions vanish. When the string coordinates are expanded in a
perturbation series in the string scale a', the terms in the beta functions that are
the lowest order in a' contain terms proportional to the Ricci curvature Rab of the
spacetime metric field gab(x) and second derivatives of the scalar field F(x). The
vanishing of the beta functions ends up being equivalent to satisfying the Einstein
equation for a spacetime with a scalar field

at distance scales large compared to the string scale. Notice this means that our
understanding of spacetime from perturbative string theory will always be
incomplete, except in some special circumstances described below.

What about strings and black holes?

Black holes are solutions to the Einstein equation, therefore string theories
that contain gravity also predict the existence of black holes. But string theories
give rise to more interesting symmetries and types of matter than are commonly
assumed in ordinary Einstein relativity. In particular, electric/magnetic duality in
string theory has led to the discovery of many new types of black holes with
combinations of electric and magnetic charge, coupled to both scalar and axion
fields. Also, string theory has motivated an understanding of black holes in higher
dimensions, and of black extended objects such as strings and branes.

Some of these new stringy extreme black hole solutions possess unbroken
supersymmetries at the event horizon, so that the physics at the horizon is
protected from higher order perturbative corrections by virtue of supersymmetric
nonrenormalization theorems. These types of black holes have been important for
understanding the origin of black hole entropy in string theory,and that will be
described in the next section.
Is spacetime fundamental?

Note that string theory does not predict that the Einstein equations are obeyed
exactly. Perturbative string theory adds an infinite series of corrections to the
Einstein equation

So our understanding of spacetime in perturbative string theory is only valid as

long as spacetime curvature is small compared to the string scale.

However, when these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime

geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result. Only under very strict
symmetry conditions, such as unbroken supersymmetry, are there known exact
solutions to the spacetime geometry in string theory.

This is a hint that perhaps spacetime geometry is not something fundamental

in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large distance
scales or weak coupling. This is an idea with enormous philosophical implications.

What is black hole entropy?

Two important thermodynamic quantities are temperature and entropy.

Temperature we all know from our fevers, weather reports and ovens. Entropy
however is foreign to everyday life for most people.

Suppose we have a box filled with gas of some type of molecule called M.
The temperature of that gas in that box tells us the average kinetic energy of
those vibrating molecules of gas. Each molecule as a quantum particle has
quantized energy states, and if we understand the quantum theory of those
molecules, theorists can count up the available quantum microstates of
those molecules and get some number. The entropy is the logarithm of that
number.

When it was discovered that black holes can decay by quantum

processes, it was also discovered that black holes seem to have the
thermodynamic properties of temperature and entropy. The temperature of the
black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, so the black hole gets hotter and
hotter as it decays.

The entropy of a black hole is one fourth of the area of the event horizon, so
the entropy gets smaller and smaller as the black hole decays and the event
horizon area becomes smaller and smaller.

But until string theory there was not a clear relation between quantum
microstates of a quantum theory and this supposed black hole entropy.
Black holes and branes in string theory

A black hole is an object that is described by a spacetime geometry that is a

solution to the Einstein equation. In string theory at large distance scales,
solutions to the Einstein equation are only modified by very small corrections. But
it has been discovered through string duality relations that spacetime geometry is
not a fundamental concept in string theory, and at small distance scales or when
the forces are very strong, there is an alternate description of the same physical
system that appears to be very different.

A special type of black hole that is very important in string theory is called a
BPS black hole. A BPS black hole has both charge (electric and/or magnetic) and
mass, and the mass and the charges satisfy an equality that leads to unbroken
supersymmetry in the spacetime near the black hole. This supersymmetry is very
important because it results in the disappearance of messy quantum corrections,
so that precise answers about the physics near the black hole horizon can be
found by simple calculations.

In the previous section we learned that string theories contain objects called p-
branes and D-branes. Since a point can be thought of as a zero-brane, a natural
generalization of a black hole is a black p-brane. And there are also BPS black p-
branes.

But there's also a relationship between black p-branes and D-branes. At large
values of the charge, spacetime geometry is a good description of of a black p-
brane system. But when the charge is small, the system can be described by a
bunch of weakly interacting D-branes.

In this weakly coupled D-brane limit, with the BPS condition satisfied, it is
possible to calculate the number of available quantum states. This answer
depends on the charges of the D-branes in the system.

When we go back to the geometrical limit of the equivalent black hole of p-

brane system with the same charges and masses, we find that the entropy of the
D-brane system matches the entropy as calculated from the black hole or p-brane
event horizon area.

This was a fantastic result for string theory. But can we now say that D-branes
provide the fundamental quantum microstates of a black hole that underlie black
hole thermodynamics? The D-brane calculation is only easily performed for the
supersymmetric BPS black objects. Most black holes in the Universe probably
have very little if any electric or magnetic charge, and are very far from being
BPS objects. It's still a challenge to compute the black hole entropy for such an
object using D-branes.

What is black hole entropy?

Two important thermodynamic quantities are temperature and entropy.

Temperature is a familiar quantity measured by direct personal experience.
Entropy however is a more mysterious quantity. It was discovered in an
roundabout way, when scientists noticed that in certain experiments with gases,
there was a constant ratio between the heat exchanged in the process, and the
temperature at which the process occurred. So entropy was discovered by
observing processes in which it was conserved.
 But what is entropy, really? That answer only came after the macroscopic
thermodynamic properties of gases and fluids were understood in terms of the
quantum statistical behavior of their microscopic constituents. Temperature was
revealed to be calculable from the average kinetic energy of a system of identical
particles, and entropy was understood in terms of the number of quantum states
available to the particles in that system.

If we have some system with some energy E, number of particles N, being

kept in a volume V, then the entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the
density of quantum states of that system

For an ideal gas, this quantity can be calculated from basic quantum principles
to be

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole is one fourth of the area of

the event horizon (in units where Planck's constant=GN=1). This black hole
entropy behaves just like the entropy of a thermodynamic system should behave.
But what theory will allow us to derive macroscopic black hole entropy using the
density of states of some underlying microscopic quantum statistical system?

Until string theory, there was no clear idea how this task could be
accomplished. String theory has provided at least a partial answer to this
question in terms of D-branes.

Black holes and branes in string theory

A black hole is an object that is described by a spacetime geometry that is a

solution to the Einstein equation. In string theory at large distance scales,
solutions to the Einstein equation are only modified by very small corrections. But
it has been discovered through string duality relations that spacetime geometry is
not a fundamental concept in string theory, and at small distance scales or when
the forces are very strong, there is an alternate description of the same physical
system that appears to be very different.

Bearing that in mind, let's start with the simplest charged black p-brane
solution known, which is a charged black hole in four spacetime dimensions,
described by the metric

If the charge and mass are equal in magnitude (in units where c=GN=1) then
we have an extreme black hole, with area 4pQ2, and therefore with entropy pQ2.
This extreme black hole is a special object because when M=Q, a condition for
unbroken supersymmetry is satisfied that is called the BPS condition. This BPS
condition results in the cancellation of quantum corrections to the effective action
for string theory, so that precise answers can be found by simple calculations at
lowest order in perturbation theory.

The above black hole can be thought of as a zero-brane. In the previous

section we learned that string theories contain objects called p-branes and D-
branes. A natural generalization of a black hole is a black p-brane. And there are
also BPS black p-branes.

Unfortunately, the string theory solution to the black hole entropy problem
cannot be easily illustrated for the simple charged black hole above. The simplest
example that can be calculated features a system of a one-brane (i.e. a string)
with charge Q1 lying parallel to a five-brane with charge Q5, with momentum p5 in
the finite fifth dimension which is proportional to an integer n5.

The spacetime metric for this system is very complicated and won't be
reproduced here, but from the area of the extreme object, one can derive the
entropy

This is the macroscopic thermodynamic result. Now how does string theory
connect this to a microscopic density of quantum states? We have to look to the
relationship between black p-branes and D-branes. This p-brane system has
charges that match an equivalent D-brane system. The critical parameter that
interpolates between the geometric limit and the D-brane description is the string
coupling g times the D-brane charge Q. At large values of gQ, spacetime
geometry is a good description of of a black p-brane system. But when gQ is
much smaller than one, the system can be described by a bunch of weakly
interacting D-branes.

In this weakly coupled D-brane limit, with the BPS condition satisfied, it is
possible to calculate the density of available quantum states. This answer
depends on the charges of the D-branes in the system as follows

The entropy is just the logarithm of the density of states, so from this we can
see that the entropy of the microscopic D-brane system matches the entropy as
calculated from the macroscopic event horizon area.

This was a fantastic result for string theory. But can we now say that D-branes
provide the fundamental quantum microstates of a black hole that underlie black
hole thermodynamics? The D-brane calculation is only easily performed for the
supersymmetric BPS black objects. Most black holes in the Universe probably
have very little if any electric or magnetic charge, and are very far from being
BPS objects. It's still a challenge to compute the black hole entropy for such an
object using D-branes.

PEOPLE
Recent studies have revealed that most Americans, if asked to draw a picture of a
scientist, would come up with a figure looking something like Albert Einstein.

While Einstein was indeed a remarkable individual and gave birth to theories that
lie at the foundation of modern physics, science in general and physics in
particular rely on the strength of an entire community of critical partners in
slicing and dicing through speculation and and fantasy to get to the part where
we start effectively describing Nature.

String theory has a large, vibrant and diverse international community at work
generating, refining and testing ideas. In this section we interview some
random members of the string community. (Not one of whom bears the
slightest physical resemblance to Einstein.)

Interviews:

1- John Schwarz

John Schwarz recalls the long history of string theory

John Schwarz was just a young PhD fresh out of UC Berkeley,

back in the days of draft-

card burning and sad send-offs to Vietnam, when string

theory began as a field. When the particle physics fervor over
string theory as a way to describe protons and neutrons
abated, Schwarz and small crew who remained saw the
possibility of describing quantum gravity using strings and
stuck with the subject, weathering career slowdowns and
barbed comments along the way. Today he is the Harold
Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech.

You started working on string theory many years ago, when it

was treated with scepticism (at best) by most of your peers
and role models in physics. Were you ever tempted to give up
and go work on more conventionally accepted and supported
theoretical physics?

I was never tempted to work on something else because I was convinced

that what I was doing was the right thing to be doing. So I kept at it. I
obviously would have preferred had there been more widespread acceptance
of what I was doing earlier but the fact that there wasn't didn't influence me to
consider doing something else.

After the anomaly cancellation calculation in 1984, your whole life changed.
String theory became a mainstream research topic, you were made a tenured
professor, and the string community began to thrive. Why did things change so
rapidly after that one calculation?

That came as quite a surprise to me because for several years prior to that,
I had, we had made various discoveries that we thought would convince
people that what we were doing was worthwhile, we being me and Michael
Green, there was very little reaction to our previous results, so with that
experience behind me, when we did the anomaly cancellation calculation, by that
time I didn't really expect a dramatic response anymore. The thing that was
different this time, though, was that very early on, Witten got wind of what we
were up to and phoned me up asking for an early copy of our paper which I
Fedexed to him. This was before the days of electronic communication and so I'm
told that the next day everybody in Princeton university and the Institute for
Advanced Study was studying this paper. After that things went very fast with the
heterotic string and other things being done by people.

How much has string theory grown since it began in terms of the number of
papers being written and the number of people working in the field?

String theory has had various ebbs and flows through time. In the early
years, being the late 1960's, early 1970's, it was a quite active area of
research - a couple hundred people working on it, each producing a few
papers per year, but then it went very much into decline and there were just a
few people working on it for a long period of time, and then, following this
anomaly cancellation that we were just discussing a large number of people
started working on the subject, several hundred, it's hard to be very precise and
after that there have been somewhere between fifty and a hundred papers per
month I would say. In the last few years things have been moving along really
well and its probably as active now as it's ever been. One piece of evidence for
the popularity of the subject is the attendance of various conferences. Each year
there's a string theory conference and so for example, "Strings `95" at USC,
there were perhaps 150 participants where as "Strings `97" in Amsterdam this
past summer there were over 300.

What is currently the best hope on the horizon for finding some experimental
support for the predictions of string theory?

Well, it's difficult to think of the experiments that could be easily performed
that would test the ideas that we're proposing. Well, one very nice possibility
is supersymmetry. This is a symmetry in the theory that predicts for every
particle there should be a partner particle, and none of the supersymmetry
partner particles has yet been discovered, but if our ideas are roughly right then
we should be getting very close to discovering some of these and there seems to
be a reasonable chance that one or more of them might turn up at the currently
operating accelerators either in CERN in Switzerland or at Fermilab lab outside of
Chicago, but if these accelerators fail to find supersymmetry particles then there's
a very good chance they'll be found at the next large collider to be built, which is
one that will be completed in CERN in the year 2005.
 2- Sir Michael Atiyah

Sir Michael Atiyah on math, physics and fun

Sir Michael Atiyah, formerly a professor at both

Oxford and Cambridge, is one of the foremost
mathematicians of the 20th century, and still an
important force in the 21st. In the 1960s Atiyah, with
Isaac Singer of MIT, proved powerful and far-
reaching "index theorems" making profound
connections between geometry, topology and algebra
relating to the physics of quantum operators in
quantum field theory. He has also developed a
branch of algebraic geometry called K theory. These
advanced mathematical methods, as well as many others he has developed or
inspired, have had an immeasurable influence on modern theoretical physics.
Atiyah is of Lebanese and Scottish descent and was educated in Cairo and
Manchester before entering Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society in 1962 and awarded the Fields Medal in 1966. His other
prizes, awards and honors are too numerous to mention but are listed here.

Sir Michael, what led you to become a mathematician?

Well, I think I was always interested in mathematics when I was a boy, and good
at it, I enjoyed it, but there was a time when I wanted to become a chemist.
And I oscillated between mathematics and chemistry. But one year
advanced chemistry was enough for me. You had to memorize so much
stuff. In mathematics all you had to know was a few principles and figure it out
yourself. It's so much easier.

Was it organic chemistry that got to you?

No, it was inorganic. It was how to make sulfuric acid and all that sort of stuff.
Lists of facts, just facts, you had to memorize a vast amount of material. Organic
chemistry was more interesting, there was a bit of structure to it. But inorganic
chemistry was just a mountain of facts in books like this.

It's true that in mathematics you don't really need an enormous memory. You
can work most things out for yourself, remember a few principles. If you're good
at that, then it comes easily. If you want to do other things, you've got to work
hard to learn a lot of facts. There was one reason, I think. But I enjoy thinking,
I'm good at it, and will continue with it.

How do mathematicians view the history of physics?

Well, I think if you go back in the past, those in mathematics and physics
were called natural philosophers in those days, there wasn't really any
difference. Early mathematics all grew out of practical needs and
computations, you have tomato fields and you have to do this. Newton's work in
calculus was all to work out the dynamics of motion, so there was really no
difference. All the great, well most of the great figures of the past were
mathematicians or physicists of distinguishment, many of them. Newton, of
course. Gauss, and others. Some were of course very much more pure
mathematicians by our standards, and some physicists would of course not be
very mathematical. But a large number of them worked out the mathematics they
needed and mathematics developed out of the needs of the physics to a great
extent. Not entirely, but a large part of it, so there's been a long history where
it's both. Only in recent times is there this distinction between what's called a
mathematician and what's called a scientist. They weren't physicists and chemists
in those days, they were natural philosophers, and natural philosophy included
mathematics. So it was much more unified.

Do you see that this specialization will continue in the future or will they always
be sort of organically knit together, mathematics and physics?

Well, all of this always diversifies on one hand and becomes more
specialized, but there are various times when things interact again, and
what's been happening in recent knowledge with modern developments in
theoretical physics is that there's been a need to employ more and more
advanced mathematics, so mathematics independently developed for other
reasons has been brought into the fold. And so what appeared to be diverging
strands have been brought together again. There've probably been similar
specializations in different directions, and every now and then when we've got a
good period, things will reconverge. And right at the moment we're in a
reconverging period so it's a lot of fun.

What would you say has been the impact of string theory on mathematics?

Well that's very difficult to say. It's really to early to have any kind of final
picture. We don't even know what string theory is. But it's had an impact on
mathematics which has been really quite extraordinary. First of all, the
impact of string theory on mathematics has fairly extensive. It covers many areas
of mathematics, not just one. Geometry, topology, and algebraic geometry and
group theory, almost anything you want, seems to be thrown into the mixture.
And in a way that seems to be very deeply connected with their central content,
not just tangential contact, but into the heart of mathematics. And at the same
time, the physics ideas have produced ways of thinking and ideas and
speculations which go back and produce quite spectacular results and conjectures
that mathematicians have been busy working on, which they had no previous way
of getting hold of.

I would say the biggest impact on mathematics has been as a whole new
collection of results and conjectures where you have to deal with, broadly
speaking, with what you might call dualities, where the same thing can appear
two different guises. In the physics framework these dualities are broadly
understood at some conceptual level, even if not technically, and in the
mathematics, the dual picture comes out to be totally different. So it's a great
challenge for the mathematicians on the ground, to see what we got from the
sky, these two things may go together. Working out how that is going to work out
in detail is going to be a big challenge for mathematicians. It has transformed
and revitalized and revolutionized large parts of mathematics. And so you could
say that mathematics in the first half of the 20th century, large parts of it, will be
devoted to understanding the impact of string theory on physics and
mathematics.

One way of looking at it, it's not the only way, but one way of looking at it also is
that large parts of physics are concerned with things coming out of quantum field,
before we get to string theory. And quantum field theory is about working on
infinite-dimensional spaces, infinite-dimensional manifolds, infinite-dimensional
groups' function spaces, and doing it in a very detailed way, a lot of detailed
calculations and geometry and analysis. And so you could say the mathematics of
the earlier century was basically, large parts of it, finite-dimensional. The
mathematics of the 21st century will be pretty infinite. Infinite-dimensional stuff
in terms of linear theory, Hilbert spaces and that stuff, that will have been done a
long time. But nonlinear, all the subtleties and complicated topologies and
geometry and so on, nobody did those things at all, barely. Early work on Morse
theory and sort of, closed geodesics and so on, were just to scratch the surface.
All this new stuff from physics seems to be some overarching attempt to build a
big hierarchy of things for infinite-dimensional geometry. And so the 21st century
might look like that in the future. In the nineteenth century, all they played
around with was N dimensions. In the eighteenth they only played around with
three dimensions, then go back to two dimensions and one dimensions.

And so you can figure in that way we're leading to a new chapter in mathematics.
In its very early days, and its hard to say what it will look like when its finished.
But if I had to make a prediction about what people will say about it in the year
2100, then that's what I would say. That the big change was this shift into a
totally different frame. And using infinite-dimensional ideas, you get back, of
course, results in finite dimensions, that's the miracle.

So it seems there's a lot of mathematical momentum for string theory, even

though the experimentalists aren't too happy with it yet.

Why I was told just yesterday somebody was talking about the latest
experiment that seems to suggest that supersymmetry might be needed. No
I think that I agree with you. Of course it's reassuring for physicists that
what they're playing with, even if we can't measured it experimentally, appears
to have a very rich, consistent mathematical structure, which not only is
consistent but actually opens up new doors and gives new results and so on.
They're on to something, obviously. Whether that something is what God's
created for the Universe remains to be seen. But if He didn't do it for the
Universe, it must have been for something. So it's something worthy of trying to
study, there's no question about that..

Sir Isaac Newton, when he became a physicist, he only had to learn first year
calculus. Today's physics and math students have to learn so much more. Where
will it all end?

Just one slight correction - Isaac Newton didn't have to learn calculus, he
had to invent calculus. That's a different story altogether. And I think the
norm in mathematics in general, in the history of mathematics, is it builds
enormous structures, and we've been doing it now for thousands of years or
hundreds of years at least, so you wonder how on Earth we can go on learning
and doing more.

And the reason is of course because mathematics has this great propensity to
unify. People find out lots of things, and then at the next stage they say, well all
these are special cases of some one simple picture. We abstract out of them all.
People object to that business abstracting, they say why don't you stay concrete.
Well the whole point about it is if you stay concrete, you're always tied to tables
and chairs, you can't see the bigger picture.

So mathematicians constantly move up a level. As they go forward, they have all

these examples of something, we'll see what's common, and give it a nice title
and unify it. And with that under our belts, we can put it in a small textbook and
move on.

And for century after century, mathematicians have been building this big
structure where we absorb what we've done before, put it together in a simple
pattern, and I think that not only mathematics but science as a whole, only
progresses if you can understand things. It isn't just a matter of, you know,
getting a lot of results out of the computer. If science, all it did was to produce a
string of numbers, we'd soon be terribly lost. Its aim is to produce ideas and
explain things in simple terms. All science is like that.

And if it does that, then all the earlier stuff that people... You know, before we
understood about the basis of chemistry, they had all sorts of ridiculous stuff.
Once they understood about atoms as a whole, it all clicked into place, and most
older stuff was forgotten. And the same is true in mathematics. You explore and
get through a lot of things, and suddenly you unify everything. So it's this ability
of mathematics to unify things what comes before, and simplify it, so that the
next generation of students can all say, oh gosh, how easy it all looks. Calculus, I
can learn that in six months. And it took a great genius like Newton, and Leibniz,
too, their whole lifetimes struggling with it.

So we can make progress, otherwise it would be impossible. And it's always

surprising. Any one generation.. When I was a student I only had to learn this,
and now all the students have to learn this and a lot more, how can they possibly
be... and yet you still see them coming along, cheerfully, maybe. In no time at
all, they're up to speed and on the front lines. You can see it happening, it's
always happening.

And the explanation of why it happens is what I've given you. Mathematics and
physics and a lot of science aims to unify by simplifying and enabling the next
stage to go forward. It's easier in mathematics. Obviously with something in the
area of biology, unification isn't as straightforward. DNA unified a lot of stuff, but
there's still a lot more complication in biology. But physics is much closer to
mathematics, this end of physics, the basic end. There are parts of physics which
are also messy and complicated where you don't really unify easily. But the parts
related to mathematics are pristine clear and simple. So I think that's always
hope yet for the next generation of students.

Back to your own work. What led you to develop K theory, which is currently of
interest in string theory?

Well I say, it was a big surprise to me to find that it was of interest in string
theory. K theory really arose out of algebraic geometry, but basically what
it's concerned with is the interrelationship of topology and linear algebra,
linear analysis. You study linear things, and you have linear things that depend
on parameters, you study how they vary, and the topological implications of that.
And K theory is the formal outcome of that.

Geometry originally started with linear things. Linear things like curves. If you
study tangent spaces to manifolds, they are families of flat things, they are
families of vector spaces. So once you get from geometry, immediately you start
worrying about things like families of vector spaces, and K theory is the outcome.
So large parts of differential geometry and topology have a natural formulation in
terms of it. And so K theory was a natural outcome. There were a bit of accidents
here and there, so it happened, but you can reasonably speculate that it was
inevitable something like this would happen. In many ways it formalizes notions
like traces in linear algebra. And of course you've gone to linear analysis, with
operators, so it gets up into index theory and so on. So I knew that the physicists
would be interested in the analysis side. That would come up, we discovered that
twenty years ago.

What I'm much more surprised at is they're interested in the more basic
topological side, which is, although connected, in some ways independent, and
elementary, in some ways, but quite delicate. And some parts of the topology
physicists now seem to need is not just only the basic thing which I did a long
time ago, but even more refined refinements and variations on the theme which
seemed extremely recherché at the time, and some of them so recherché that we
didn't even bother to follow them up.

And now the physicists say, we need this, we need this, we need that, and I've
got to go back, you know, and see what you can do.

But in a general way I believe that if you work in mathematics on fundamental

basic central things like continuity and linear analysis and so on, they whatever
you do is going to be used in all sorts of places. I was just having lunch the other
day with a chap who's an electrical engineer at UCLA and he applies K theory in
control theory for robotics. He says it's very important to study the variations of
operators. So if you're doing basic things, they are bound to turn up. But it was
certainly surprising the way they turned up now, I don't understand it. I've spent
two months trying to find out a bit more. It's fascinating. We really don't know
quite why it's necessary, why it works, but it seems to be a pragmatic fact of life
that K theory is important in string theory, and the more people go along, the
more they find out about it.

Do you have any sense or expectations of what this program is going to result in?
You did this work earlier but the story isn't over yet.

String theory or K theory? String theory... everyone who works in this field
soon aims to understand string theory in a way not yet understood. String
theory is meant to be some approximate perturbative expansion of some
theory not yet known. People are grappling with it in the dark and they're looking
for everything they can get that gives a clue. And I think the way K theory comes
in is certainly a bit of a clue. There's lots of places where it comes into string
theory at a different level, and since K theory is my background, I like to think
about these things and see whether they can possibly suggest what the ultimate
picture might look like. And we don't know what that picture is, but it could be
the ultimate picture will involve K theory in a some way in a rather central role.

It's come in by the back door, and somehow people find it's useful. Why? We
don't even quite know. It lurks around the various corners. So I think that if there
is an eventual simpler picture that emerges, then I would think that something
like K theory, or versions of it, will be an important component. I'd like to think
that, it seems rather plausible, but it's very speculative as to what this final
theory will look like and how long it will be before it gets there. But I certainly
think its happening at the moment. It may not be that far away. In five or ten
years we may get a really big insight, some young will come along and open up
the doors. And K theory may figure quite interestingly in it.

What makes a mathematics problem fun for you? You spoke earlier, in a talk you
gave, about a fun problem. So what's fun?
 Well, there are two different things. The main thing that interests me in
mathematics always is the interconnection between different parts of
mathematics, the fact that one problem may have half a dozen different
ways of being looked at in different subjects, a bit of algebra, a bit of geometry, a
bit of topology. It's this interaction and bridges that interest me. I'm not that
keen on becoming entirely focused on a single area where you forget about
everything else and go down with a big bore hole deep down to the middle. I
prefer things that unite across the borders. I find that exciting. Occasionally
there's some fun in the more lighthearted or frivolous sense. There are some
problems which are fun because they're elementary, but strange and difficult to
solve to all degrees, unexpected relationships. There's a problem I'm working on
at the moment, in what you refer to, is amusing probably in some ways. I don't
know what it means or why it's there. It just forces itself on my attention as a
problem that is interesting to look at and understand, and fun in some general
sense. It may turn out to be I'm peering through a window into some new deep
unknown underground treasure, I don't know yet, or maybe that's the window
into a rather small piece of scenery. We don't know until we've drawn the veil.

But I like two things in mathematics - unification, things that unite, unexpectedly,
you know. Many beautiful things in mathematics prove something in subject A.
By a marvelous and unexpected link a subject way in the corner over there, if you
apply this idea then presto, you get to solve those problems, and that's the sort
of thing I like. That's one form of unexpected thing. In general, the unexpected.

If someone is plowing along with a big machine and gradually grinding away and
you chug away at the rock face, then that's not very exciting. But if somehow
there's a breakthrough and something totally unexpected happens, occasionally.
It only happens in mathematics every decade perhaps, something like that
happens, like Donaldson's work on four-dimensional manifolds. That was a real
spectacular opening, and totally unexpected, out of the blue. And that's really
exciting. So I'm really excited by things that are totally unexpected.

And that's why of course when people ask you what's going to happen in
mathematics, the most interesting things are the things you can't predict, by
definition. If you can predict it... Predictable things are within your grasp, you can
get there. Unpredictable is exciting, and we hope there will be unpredictable
things for a long way into the future.

I think the way a lot of people think about mathematics, since it's all based on
logic, it can't be unpredictable.

Well, the idea that mathematics is synonymous with logic is a great

ridiculous statement that some people make. Mathematics is very difficult to
define, actually, what constitutes mathematics. Logical thinking is a key part
of mathematics, but it's by no means the only part. You've got to have a lot of
input and material from somewhere, you've got to have ideas coming from
physics, concepts from geometry. You've got to have imagination, you're going to
use intuition, guesswork, vision, like a creative artist has. In fact, proofs are
usually only the last bit of the story, when you come to tie up the... dot the i's
and cross the T's. Sometimes the proof is needed to hold the whole thing
together like the steel structure of a building, but sometimes you've stopped
putting it together, and the proof is just the last little bit of polish on the surface.

So the most time mathematicians are working, they're concerned with much
more than proofs, they're concerned with ideas, understanding why this is true,
what leads where, possible links. You play around in your mind with a whole host
of ill-defined things.

And I think that's one thing the field can get wrong when they're being taught to
students. They can see a very formal proof, and they can see, this is what
mathematics is. My story I can tell. When I was a student I went to some lectures
on analysis where people gave some very formal proofs about this being less than
epsilon and this is bigger than that. Then I had private supervision from a
Russian mathematician called Bessikovich, a good analyst, and he'd draw a little
picture and say, this -- this is small, this -- this is very small. Now that's the way
an analyst thinks. None of this nonsense about precision. Small, very small. You
get an idea what is going on. And then you can work it out afterwards. And
people can be misled, if you read books, textbooks or go to lectures, and you see
this very formal approach and you think, gosh that's the way I gotta think, and
they can be turned off by that because that's not an interesting thing,
mathematics, you see. You aren't thinking at that point imaginatively.

But you mustn't get carried away by the other extreme. You mustn't go all the
time with airy-faery ideas that you can't actually write and solve a problem.
That's a danger. But you've got to have a balance between being able to be
disciplined and solve problems and apply logical thinking when necessary. And at
other times you've got to be able to freely float in the atmosphere like a poet and
imagine the whole universe of possibilities, and hope that eventually you come
down to Earth somewhere else. So it's very exciting to be a practicing
mathematician or a physicist. Physicists in principle have to tie themselves down
to Earth more than mathematicians, and one day look at experimental data. Well
mathematicians have to tie themselves down in other ways too. A proof is one of
the things that instantly ties them down. But it's a mistake to think that
mathematics and logic are the same. They overlap in important ways, but it's a
big mistake. I'm not very good at logic.

What is the most fun problem you've worked on so far?

Well I suppose the problem I like most of the things I did was a problem I
attacked which concerned the thing called an index, the formula for a
manifold with a boundary, which ended up by being a formula that
connected three different terms, one of which was a topological invariant, one of
which was an analytical invariant in terms of eigenvalues of operators, and the
third of it was an integral expression involving curvature. So topology, differential
geometry and analysis, all written into one simple formula, with a rather nice
geometrical interpretation. And I think that was the thing I really most enjoyed
doing, traveling across three different borders. It's one that's now used by
physicists, that have different meanings, it also has applications in some bits of
number theory. It's a very nice example of straddling right across the three
different subjects like that.

Do you have a favorite mathematician from before the 20th century?

Well it's a bit like asking who's your favorite musician. Depending how you
feel, one day you can say Beethoven, another day you can say Mozart.

So who would it be today?

In mathematics, obviously you have to begin with what the word favorite means.
If you're just trying to say who were the greatest mathematicians of all times,
you can talk about Newton or you can talk about Gauss, and so on. But if you're
trying to use the word favorite in a slightly more personal sense, the person I
think I like, well, there are two people that come to mind. One is Riemann. He
was a person, first of all, his collected works occupy one volume, unlike Euler,
where we talk about thirteen volumes. And in that one volume, he put forward
the foundations of modern differential geometry, the Riemann zeta function, an
important problem in fluid mechanics. He had a whole range of things which he
initiated. And in fact although this was the 19th century, it turned out to
determine a large part of the work in the 20th century. He was very far in
advance of his times, very deep, original. And being nice and compact in one
volume has a kind of appeal, a quality.

The other persona I have a lot of admiration for in a personal way was Walter
Hamilton, Walter Rowan Hamilton, who was a mathematical physicist.
Hamiltonian mechanics, Hamiltonians, is specific to physics, but he also invented
quaternions, which is a great part of mathematics, which I'm very fond of as well.
He was an original mathematician in many ways, a slightly difficult character as a
person. But I like the unusual. You said before the 20th century, so that rules out
the people who overlap the 18th, 19th and 20th century like Poincaré and so on.
For the 19th century I think it has to be Riemann and to a lesser extent,
Hamilton.

3- Ed Witten

Ed Witten on M theory, supersymmetry and appreciating calculus

Ed Witten, who is currently visiting Caltech, is a professor at the Institute for

Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (the place where Einstein used to
work.) Witten was not one of the creators of string theory, but since he joined
"Team String" in the mid-eighties, he's been a leading visionary, pausing here
and there to make revolutionary observations and discoveries in mathematics
using observations gleaned from high energy theoretical physics. He recently
spent two years at Caltech, a development that had East Coast string theorists
fearing that the United States was tilting to the West. We interviewed him in John
Schwarz's office at Caltech, which also happened to Richard Feynman's office
when he was alive.

What's the current answer to the question, "What is string theory?"

Well, we've understood somehow that there's a more unified picture that mixes up
quantum mechanical effects controlled by hbar and string effects controlled by alpha
prime. So, there's this M theory story where different string theories are mixed up by
dualities. I can't claim that we've gotten to the bottom of it, though.

What is M theory?
 M theory is a name for a more unified theory that has the different string theories, as
we know them, as limits, and which also can reduce, under appropriate conditions, to
eleven-dimensional supergravity. There's this picture that we all have to draw where
different string theories are limits of this M theory, where M stands for Magic, Mystery or
Matrix, but it also sometimes is seen as standing for Murky, because the truth about M
theory is Murky. And the different limits, where the main parameter simplifies, give the
different string theories -- Type IIA, Type IIB, Type I, and there's eleven-dimensional
supergravity, which turns out to be an important limit even though it isn't part of the
systematic perturbation expansion, then there's the E8XE8 heterotic string, and there's
SO(32) heterotic string.

So M-theory is a name for this picture, this more general picture that will generate the
different limits through the different string theories. The parameters in this picture we can
think of being roughly hbar, which is Planck's constant, and that determines how important
the quantum effects are, and the other parameter is alpha prime, which is the tension,
related to the tension of the string, that determines how important stringy effects are. So
traditionally, a physicist looking at Type IIA, for example, by traditional weak coupling
methods, explores this little region, and if asked how his theory is related to Type I theory,
the answer would have to be, "Well I don't know, that's something else."

And likewise, if you ask this observer what happens for strong coupling, the traditional
answer was, "Well I don't know." In graduate courses, you learn that you can do more or
less anything for weak coupling, but you can't do anything for strong coupling. What
happened in the 90s was that we learned how to do a little bit for strong coupling, and it
turned out that the answer is Type IIA at strong coupling turns out to be Type I in a slightly
different limit, SO(32) heterotic, and so on. So we built up this more unified picture, but we
still don't understand what it means

What is K theory and what does it mean for string theory?

K theory is a mathematical theory that studies topology using matrices, using

operators that don't commute with each another. What topology is, first of all, is the
branch of mathematics where you don't care about the shape, so for example, a
lumpy ball is equivalent to a round ball. But if there are holes, you do care about that, so a
donut is different from either of these two. So, mathematicians learned, around 1960, that
there was a very powerful tool in topology based on matrices, and that tool was K theory.
And since quantum mechanics is about non-commuting operators, or matrices, there has
always been a kind of naive analogy between K theory and quantum mechanics. An
analogy that seemed naive to most physicists, but was often drawn by mathematicians
such as Michael Atiyah.

However, we learned in the last few years that some questions about string theory, but
slightly specialized questions usually, are usefully addressed using K theory. What K theory
really addresses is a little bit subtle to explain. If you want to understand the charges
carried by the D-branes, that's a question that leads to K theory. Or I might say at an even
more basic level, D-branes are these strange objects whose positions are measured by
matrices, and studying those matrices leads to K theory.

So K theory is the sort of topological underpinning of D-brane theory. But as physicists

we're interested very much in whether the ball is round or lumpy, as are different things in
physics. We wouldn't want to play baseball with a lumpy ball. So, the topology is just one
side of the story..
 What is noncommutative geometry and why is it important in string theory?

Well, one thing which we know about for sure in string theory is that the ordinary
classical ideas about geometry are approximations, and don't really work precisely.
But what you should really replace them with is not clear. However, there's a naive
ideas about strings which really only works for open strings. Open strings are strings with
endpoints, like in the original Type I superstring, where a particle was represented by a
piece of string with charges at the ends. I've labeled the charges as q and q-bar for quark
and antiquark, but that's modern terminology that might not have been present in the early
says of string theory.

Once you've got open strings, they can join together, I'm going to call my open strings A or
B, and they join end to end. But there are two ways of joining them. I could join them with
A on the left and B on the right, or I could join them with B on the left and A on the right,
and I get two different outputs. And it's very much like taking two matrices A and B and
multiplying them together. So there's some noncommutativity in the interactions.

And when you take account of the fact that string theory is all about geometry, somehow
this is geometry where noncommutative objects are built in. In fact I've mentioned now a
couple portions of it. There's the noncommutativity of joining strings, and there's the
matrices that don't commute, which are related to K theory and also to the D-brane
positions and so on.
Anyway, coming back here, you can try to systematically describe open string physics at
least in terms of noncommutative ideas introduced in geometry,and you can get a general
answer of some kind, but it's rather abstract and very hard to use. However, in the last
couple of years, it was discovered that there's a certain limit with a very strong background
magnetic field in which things simplify, and you can actually say something simple and
useful based on the noncommutative geometry. That's a case where the rather abstract
and hard to use noncommutative geometrical concepts actually come down to Earth and
become useful.

Why is it so hard to break supersymmetry in string theory?

Well, if I knew the answer, if I knew how Nature has done supersymmetry breaking,
then I could tell you why humans had such trouble figuring it out. But I can say one
thing about it. When supersymmetry is not broken, it's easy to get a zero cosmological
constant in string theory. And although a zero cosmological constant might not be the
truth, it's incredibly close to the truth. If you break supersymmetry, if you do it the wrong
way, you're going to get a cosmological constant that's much too big, and then you may
well get associated problems, such as instabilities, runaways and so on. So it's easy to find
ways that string theory could break supersymmetry, but they all have bad consequences.
So I assume we're missing something, which is the answer to your question.

How can the cosmological constant be so close to zero but not zero?

I really don't know. It's very perplexing that astronomical observations seem to show
that there is a cosmological constant. It's definitely the most troublesome, for my
interests, definitely the most troublesome, observation in physics in my lifetime. In my
career that is.

What has been the most surprising or interesting thing that you have learned in physics?

I'm going to interpret the question to be what's the most interesting thing I've
learned in my career, whether I discovered it or not. It's something I've learned,
perhaps through the work of other people or from textbooks. So in that sense, the
most surprising thing I've learned, even though I had nothing to do with discovering it, is
that strings can describe quantum gravity.

What has been the most surprising or interesting thing that you have learned in science
outside of physics?

Well it's not that amazing that to me, a lot of science is physics. So, for example, I
can't give you an answer in terms of chemistry, because physics underlies chemistry. I
could give you an answer in biology. Biologists have learned lots of wonderful things.
But it's hard to properly maintain one's sense of wonder about them, for some things that
were known so long that we all remember so little that we take them for granted. But
there's the theory of evolution, which is an amazing insight. And there's the understanding
of the genetic code, that's a marvelous insight.

Of course, if we move on to math, which you might think isn't physics, but which is much
closer to what I know, then there are lot's of fun and exciting things there. I hardly know
what to tell you because, again, there are lots of things that are really wonderful but which
we take for granted because it's all known. Like there's calculus. Calculus is pretty
amazing.

But... it's not the first thing that comes to mind in answering such a question, because
such a question tends to make you think of more recent discoveries. But... if I just have to
ask , of everything I've ever learned in math, what's the most amazing and surprising -- it
might by that calculus should win the prize, even though it's not so new any more.

4- Jim Gates

Jim Gates, a supersymmetrist from

superspace

Jim Gates came into particle physics at just

the right time for his brave choice of a thesis
project to assure him a place in the early
development of supersymmetry, supergravity
and superspace. He's been working to explore
and understand superspace since the
seventies. Gates received his B.A. and Ph.D.
at MIT, and is currently the John S. Toll
Professor in Physics at the University of
Maryland.

When and how did you first become interested in physics and mathematics?

Well the answer to the question has, unfortunately, a number of parts. The
first part is when I was about eight years old. My father brought home a
book one day and it was about space travel. And in this book I learned that
the stars in the sky were not just lights but places to go. And suddenly my
universe got very much larger and I knew that science was the way, science and
technology, the way to get to such places. So that was part one.

Then a little bit later we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and I was probably
in the third grade, and I was bored one day, just thumbing through one of the
volumes. And I came across Schrodinger’s Equation, and I was amazed. I knew it
was mathematics because I saw an equal to sign. Then I saw a bunch of symbols,
Greek letters and partial derivatives, which I had absolutely no idea of what it
meant. It had some sort of strange attraction to me, because it was like looking
at notes on bars for music, but not knowing how to read the music. So I felt some
affinity and said, gee I’d like one day to know what that thing means.

And then finally, the third part of it is that when I was a junior in high school, I
actually took a course in physics, I was the only junior in the class. And a really
good physics teacher. And at the beginning of the course he made the simple
demonstration that if you let an object roll down an inclined plane and measure
the time that it takes for it to roll down, you find the distance traveled is
proportional to the square of the time.

Now for most people that doesn’t mean anything, but for me this was actually an
amazing demonstration, because I had always known that mathematics was
essentially a game that we play inside our heads, and that you could make up the
rules for mathematics just like you could make up the rules for anything else. And
so by the time I was a junior, I was quite used to thinking of mathematics as
something imaginary, not having anything to do with the world around us. And
yet suddenly here was this teacher showing me that this crazy game that I knew
how to play inside my head could describe the way things move in the world
around me.

I never got over that experience. I immediately said that’s what I want to do,
because I know how to make up stuff real well, so if I’m going to make up these
mathematical games and some of them are actually going to be real, then what
could be more fun?

What led you to decide to work as a theoretical physicist, doing supersymmetry

and supergravity of all things?

Well, theoretical physicist, that part is simple. When I was a child, there
were only two things that I could imagine doing that would be interesting
when I grew up. One of them was to be an astronaut and I didn’t quite make
that one, but a very close friend of mine did. And the other option was to be a
physicist. So by the time I got my Ph.D. it was clear that the latter of these two
goals was actually something I could do in life. Theoretical because, for example,
as an undergraduate I actually double-majored in both mathematics and physics,
and math was sort of fun, but physics was actually just intensely interesting. So I
always knew it would be some sort of career combining mathematics with physics
that would be the goal that I would pursue.

Now supersymmetry and supergravity, well, that part’s got a little bit of a story
to it. When I was a graduate student looking around for a topic on which to do
my Ph.D. thesis, I started by working on a problem in what’s called weak
interaction physics, and I had an advisor who taught me some various
mathematical techniques and techniques of analysis and what have you. It was
pretty quickly clear to me that these things could be mastered and that I had
done so. But it was also pretty clear to me that if I was going to be successful in
my career, I had to find a way to distinguish myself from all the other hundreds
of young people I imagined also learning these same things.

So what I did was to make a survey of all of the literature in particle physics, this
was probably around 1976, looking and classifying what were the major trends
that I saw occurring in the field. And during this survey I came across one or two
papers which contained some of the strangest mathematics I had ever seen used
to describe physics. There were examples of symbols that were being used in
ways that hadn’t been used in any class. And as I read this material, it was an
introduction to the notion of superspace and supersymmetry, and I immediately
recognized that: a. It was new, nobody essentially knew anything about it, and b.
It was the kind of mathematical physics where having insight into geometry and
understanding some physics might actually get you a pretty far piece in making
some progress.

So I decided then to change the direction of my research from weak interaction

phenomenology, and I had a very understanding advisor who basically said go
right ahead, I’ll help you if I can when you get stuck trying to learn the material,
but you’re responsible for your own career. That was just fine with me.

So during, I guess it was my seventh and eighth year as a graduate student at

MIT, I was the only person in the department that had any interest whatsoever in
supersymmetry or supergravity. But by the time I had graduated I had essentially
gotten to the forefront of the field, being that it was such a young and new area,
and so I was able to actually make contributions in the field that had never
actually occurred before. Which meant, as some friends observed, that I had
become a “world’s expert,” which was pretty funny to me at the time.

How would you sell the idea of supersymmetry to the general public?

Well, first of all, I don’t think you actually sell an idea like supersymmetry to
the general public. The first thing I think that’s truly important is to try to
get the public to understand what it is that we’re proposing. I’m one of those
scientists that sort of feels that as scientists, we owe our public open reports on
what it is that we do in their name. Because after all, the scientist in some ways
is a luxury that society need not support.

So, the first thing is to explain supersymmetry. And I’ve got a couple of stories
that I use to do that for the general public. I often have occasion to give lectures
on the topic and what have you. One of the things I tell them is well, gee, you
know, if you look at our world, it looks like it’s composed of basically two major
parts. One of those parts is stuff like us. We’re made of, like, electrons, and
protons, and neutrons. And all of these objects have a property which is kind of
interesting, something that everybody knows, namely that you can’t put your
hand through a wall without busting it. Now that may seem like it’s not very
physical, but ultimately that statement can be translated to something called the
Exclusion Principle. Since we’re principally fermions, no two fermions can occupy
the same space at the same time. And that’s close enough for a general lay
discussion of what the Exclusion Principle is.

On the other hand, if you take something like light, you find it’s very different, so
let’s go through some thought experiments. Let’s take two flashlights, aim the
two beams of the flashlights at each other and turn them on. What happens?
Well, the two beams pass right through each other, nothing at all happens. Now
take two water hoses and do the same thing. Now of course you see that the
water starts splattering. And although that scattering is mostly electrical, even if
you could turn off the electrical charges, then you’d find that the Exclusion
Principle would drive the scattering.

So our world’s composed of these two major pieces. And the thing that’s really
weird about our world is, like I said, stuff like us seems mostly to be fermions.
The other half - energy, light, gravity, what we physicists like to call gauge fields,
are all bosons. So why does our universe have this strange dichotomy, where
stuff cannot pass through each other, but light and energy can? In fact, wouldn’t
the world be sort of more balanced, more symmetrical, or even
supersymmetrical, if there were some forms of energy that would scatter each
other just the way that stuff, matter, does, and if there were some forms of
matter that could pass right through each other just the way energy does?

Well that’s the basic idea of supersymmetry -- to say that matter can either be
fermion or boson, and that energy can either be fermion or boson. So the idea of
supersymmetry actually breaks an interesting stereotype. And let me argue by
analogy here. All Republicans are supposed to be conservatives, and all
Democrats are supposed to be liberals. At least that’s the stereotype. But, in fact,
some Democrats are conservative. And some Republicans, are, well, moderate.

So, you can break the stereotype also in the world of particles, and that’s the
idea of supersymmetry. It’s purely hypothetical, but we sure hope it’s there,
because it will be very interesting for the next millennium.

In order to learn supersymmetry and supergravity, one has to churn through a lot
of excruciating calculations. Why should we believe this is a beautiful idea?

Because it’s first of all not a beautiful idea. I think the bottom line on the
difficulty in learning something like supersymmetry or supergravity has to do
with the following statement: I don’t know if it’s possible to construct a
starship, but I’m pretty sure that the first person who figures out whether we can
construct starships will probably be working on superstrings, supersymmetry, M-
theory, something in that class of very difficult mathematical constructions. So
the idea is not that it’s painless for us to get there, but the possible benefits for
our species are so enormous that it is worth some of our time to make the
investment to go through all these terrible things like worrying about minus signs
and factors of two’s and pi’s and all the things that graduate students will
recognize in doing their homework.

For someone who carries out a life in research, in some sense that part of life
never changes. It’s like you always have a homework assignment that’s due the
next day, and you keep on churning and churning through it. So it’s the benefit,
it’s not the actual pain. I guess it’s a bit like having babies. I hear that’s painful,
too. As the father of two children, I can tell you that the results of that are just
marvelous.

What do you think are the prospects for observing direct evidence of
supersymmetry in future high energy physics experiments?

Well, first of all, I’m extremely hopeful. I’m someone who spent their entire
career, starting around 1970, and here we are in the year 2000, thinking
about the possibility that our world has supersymmetry in it. Our best
chance for observing direct evidence for supersymmetry will occur sometime after
the year 2007. Hopefully at that point in time, the Large Hadron Collider in
Geneva, Switzerland, will turn on, and we may have our first chance at forming
these new forms of matter and energy, sometimes called superpartners, which
are breaking the stereotypes that I described to you earlier.

I’m hopeful, a number of us are hopeful, and if we are successful in discovering

these forms of matter and energy, it will set an agenda for high technology for
well into the next millennium. It’s sort of like if we could go back in time to the
1870’s, the 1860’s, when people were first thinking about electricity. At that point
there was a physicist named J.G. Stoney, who one day had a crazy idea and said,
I could understand a certain result in the experiment, if there was this thing,
which he later named the electron. We all know how that story worked out,
because our beepers, our computers, all of our high technology depends on the
fact that that crazy dream of Stoney’s was in fact reality.

And that’s where we will be once again. We’ll be setting up a signpost to the new
high technology. So it’s very exciting for those of us who’ve been here for a very
long time.

5- Eva Silverstein

Eva Silverstein and the new generation of string theorists

Eva Silverstein with her favorite equations

Eva Silverstein graduated from Harvard in 1992 and earned her Ph.D. at
Princeton in 1996, studying with Ed Witten. She's earned countless awards
already in her exciting career. She's currently enjoying the San Francisco Bay
Area as an assistant professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

String theory has survived long enough to become a multigenerational enterprise.

Can you give us some reflections on being a member of the “younger generation”
in string theory?

It's true, string theory is a large, multigenerational collaboration aimed as

solving a very fascinating ambitious set of problems. In that way it's a lot
like a high energy experimental collaboration except without the hierarchical
organization. While it's true that most of the crucial groundwork on perturbative
string theory has already been paid by the older generations, many of the most
basic questions remain unanswered, and those of us in my generation are
beginning to make independent progress on those questions. I've personally had
the privilege of working closely with some others in this generation, such as
Shamit Kachru, Ofer Aharony, Albion Lawrence, Micha Berkooz, and others, and it
seems to me there's a great deal of energy and talent in our generation, which
bodes well for the future.

When did you first become interested in physics, and when did you first consider
that you might become a physicist yourself?

I first became interested when I learned what physics was some time in
high school. I had a very interesting high school physics teacher. I had
always enjoyed math and physical science and when I saw the power of
physics to explain and predict physical phenomena through simple principles and
calculations, I became hooked. I was especially fascinated by special relativity,
which starts from a simple physical principle that the speed of light, and in
general all laws of nature, are the same in all reference frames, and derives
through simple high school algebra amazing consequences such as the fact that
time slows down in moving frames. When I realized that one could produce such
things full time and actually make a living at it, I never really looked back.

What advice would you give to someone pondering graduate study in theoretical
physics? Is there anything about graduate school you know now that you really
wish you had known when you started?

Well, grad school is on the one hand a tremendous opportunity, which gives
people a chance, usually for the first time, to sample different areas of
physics through both study and research and then to freely pursue their
strongest interests. It can also be a highly frustrating experience, though, since
as a student, one is automatically behind everyone else in the field, and it takes
time to catch up. It also takes a while for people to sort of develop the right
temperament, the right balance between what you want to understand and what
you can concretely access at a given time. And also the balance between learning
and creative activity, creative research. I think some amount of frustration is
natural, and in fact indicates high standards.

Right now at universities all over America, graduate teaching assistants are trying
to form labor unions. Do you agree with university deans that student assistants
who teach are trainees on financial aid, or do you think they should be considered
employees with collective bargaining rights of their own?

I don't actually know too much about this issue, but my gut reaction is that
TA's are in fact employees and should have such collective bargaining rights.

By appearing on this web site, you are now a role model for girls all over the
world who are interested in physics. Do you have any advice for a teen out there
who might be dreaming of becoming a theoretical physicist herself one day?

Of course, my advice is to go for it. Learn as much as you can about what
interests you and start to think about what questions you'd most like to
answer. I think though that generally, everyone on the web page, and
everyone in the field, can serve as a role model for aspiring scientists. One of the
great things about science is that it brings together people from all walks of life,
interested in the same questions, who talk about it in much the same way.

6- Juan Maldacena

Juan Maldacena scores big in string theory

Argentine physicist Juan Maldacena has

apparently scored the winning the goal in the
global competition to understand the quantum
microstates of black holes. Black hole entropy as
a concept grew out of the theoretical discovery of
Hawking radiation, the outcome of combining
quantum particle theory with classical gravity in
the vicinity of a black hole.

Did you always know that you would become a

theoretical physicist, or did you make alternate
plans for yourself as a young boy?
 Well I didn't know that, when I was a young boy. I probably even didn't
know about physics at all. My father was an engineer, so I thought about
engineering. It was only in high school that I learned about physics, and I
became more interested in physics. And then I studied physics just to see what it
was like, to see if I'd like it or not, and, well, I liked it and I continued studying
physics all the time, since then.

You spent time away from pure theory to work in an experimental group. What
did you take away from that experience, and do you feel it made you a better
theorist?

Yeah, I spent some time working for experimental groups when I was
studying, and also when I was doing my Ph.D. and I thought it was
interesting, I learned something about life in the lab and things like that. I
learned about the problems you have when you really have to test some theory
or really measure something in real life. And that was very interesting.

The greatest gratification possible for a theorist is to see experimental

confirmation that a theoretical idea does indeed represent the wisdom of Nature.
How long do you think it will take before string theory becomes fully gratifying as
a scientific enterprise?

Well I think it will probably take a long time, maybe twenty or thirty years,
or maybe more, before we start seeing some of these gratifications, or some
explanation, some contact with Nature. But along the way we've been
learning lots of new things. Even though they are not the greatest gratification,
they are some partial gratifications that we are on, maybe, the right track. Or
maybe not. But we have strong hints that we are.

Right now there is a growing movement to reform physics education by instituting

various alternatives to the traditional lecture-and-homework format. Do you see
this movement succeeding in the future, or is it just an educational fad that will
pass with time? Is it inevitable that physics should be a painful subject for most
of the students who take it?

Yeah, I think that's not an inevitable fact, and I think physics could be made
more interesting. And probably, the way I see it is probably the lectures will
have a different format. But I think it's essential to learn physics to do
homework and to think about things for yourself for some time. And probably one
will need to encourage people to think for themselves, and so on, and that's the
crucial thing about physics. And it's just this learning process. In some sense I
heard once an analogy which I think is very appropriate, which is that learning
physics is like learning to play an instrument, and the only way to do it is to play
the instrument. And that equates in physics to doing homework problems and
learning to think about physics yourself.

You grew up in Argentina and now you have a permanent lifetime job in
Massachusetts. What do you miss the most about your home country, and what
do you like the most and least about your new home?

Well, what I miss the most is my family and my friends in Argentina, so the
people I knew there. And what I like about my new home is the possibility of
doing physics, and the way everything is organized, life is in many ways a
bit simpler. And what I like the least is that I cannot have these two things in the
same place.
 7- Brian Greene

Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe

Brian Greene, author of the bestselling book

about string theory, The Elegant Universe, was
educated at Harvard and Oxford, graduating in
1987. After spending time at Harvard and Cornell,
he is currently a Professor of Physics and
Mathematics at Columbia.

So Brian, the title of your new book is The Elegant

Universe. What does that phrase mean to you?

Physicists often use the term elegant to

describe a solution to a problem that is as
powerful as it is simple. It's a solution which
cuts to the heart of an important problem with
such clarity that it almost leaves no doubt that the solution is either right or at
least on the right track. And string theory is just that kind of solution. It provides
the first way of putting quantum mechanics and general relativity together -- that
is, merging the laws of the small and the laws of the large -- and it does it in such
a sleek manner that it is quite breathtaking. And the term elegant really describes
that kind of solution.

So, being an intelligent person, you could have chosen many careers. Why did
you choose physics and why, out of all physics, string theory?

Well, I think as an adolescent I had many of the questions and concerns

that many adolescents do, you know -- what's it all about, why are we here,
what are we meant to be doing with our time and so forth. And it just
occurred to me that many people much smarter than I had thought of these
questions through the ages and come up with various solutions, none of which I
guess were completely satisfying, and it didn't seem to me that I was going to
come up with a solution to those particular problems.

But it seemed to me that if one could gain a deep familiarity with the questions, a
real profound understanding of the questions themselves -- that is, why is there
space, why is there time, why is there a Universe -- then at least that would be
the first step towards coming to answers. And physics is the field that has these
questions as its real central motivating force behind the work that is done. So
that was the main reason for physics.

And then string theory -- well, I was a graduate student in 1984 in Oxford when
John Schwarz and Michael Green came up with the first real evidence that string
theory could well be the Final Theory, that the Theory of Everything, and there
was nothing more exciting to work on at that point, and I've stayed with string
theory ever since.

We have many high school students in our audience. What advice would you give
to young people who are feeling very inspired by physics and are interested in
studying string theory?

Well, I think the advice I would give is that in order to pursue research in
string theory, one needs a great deal of mathematical background, and one
should study as much mathematics as possible: geometry, algebra, things of that
sort.

And then the other key thing is to at the same time build up a physical intuition
immersing oneself in the study of physics, in the study of real physical problems
in the world around us that one can really get one's mind around in a real
concrete manner. So it's that dual track of building up a physical intuition and
supporting it by rigorous mathematical training.

In recent years we've seen enrollment dropping in physics programs. Do you

have any comments as to the cause of that problem and how we can solve it?

I don't really know what the cause of that problem is, but I think one key
way to keep enrollment up and to make it grow is to have the ideas of
science communicated at a very early age to students. Because the ideas
are terribly exciting. But sometimes I do get the sense that students are put off
by the difficulty of the technical side of physics and of mathematics. But I think
students would be more willing to engage with that difficult technical material if
they were real fired up about the ideas. And the ideas themselves are so rich and
rewarding that if they are presented in a way that can be absorbed without the
technical side at an earlier stage, I think the willingness to go forward in these
difficult areas would be stronger.

Physics is a wonderfully absorbing activity. Do you have a favorite science

outside of physics?

Well, the thing that excites me about physics is that it really seeks to answer
some of the deepest questions about the physical universe. And besides physics,
the other area of science which I think is on par with it but in a different arena is
the science of the mind. One can call it psychology or cognitive science or things
of that sort but what is it that allows the brain to produce mind? What is
consciousness? Does it have a physical basis that we can describe by
understanding the circuitry of the brain? Will we one day be able to reverse-
engineer the brain and be able to build computers that can mimic the brain and in
that way perhaps have robots that actually claim to have these sensations and
emotions of living, sentient beings? I think those are some of the deepest
questions about life, and outside of physics, I'd say those for me are the most
absorbing questions.