by Brian Greene
After a few months of intensive pursuit of this idea we came to a surprising realization. If we glued particular groups of points together in just the right way, the Calabi-Yau shape we produced differed from the one we started with in a startling manner: The number of odd-dimensional holes in the new Calabi-Yau shape equaled the number of even-dimensional holes in the original, and vice versa. In particular, this means that the total number of holes—and therefore the number of particle families—in each is the same even though the even-odd interchange means that their shapes and fundamental geometrical structures are quite different.5
Excited by the apparent contact we had made with the Dixon-Lerche-Vafa-Warner guess, Plesser and I pressed on to the linchpin question: Beyond the number of families of particles, do the two different Calabi-Yau spaces agree on the rest of their physical properties? After a couple more months of detailed and arduous mathematical analysis during which we received valuable inspiration and encouragement from Graham Ross, my thesis advisor at Oxford, and also from Vafa, Plesser and I were able to argue that the answer was, most definitely, yes. For mathematical reasons having to do with the even-odd interchange, Plesser and I coined the term mirror manifolds to describe the physically equivalent yet geometrically distinct Calabi-Yau spaces.6 The individual spaces in a mirror pair of Calabi-Yau spaces are not literally mirror images of one another, in the sense of everyday usage. But even though they have different geometrical properties, they give rise to one and the same physical universe when used for the extra dimensions in string theory.
The weeks after finding this result were an extremely anxious time. Plesser and I knew that we were sitting on an important new piece of string physics. We had shown that the tight association between geometry and physics originally set down by Einstein was substantially modified by string theory: Drastically different geometrical shapes that would imply different physical properties in general relativity were giving rise to identical physics in string theory. But what if we had made a mistake? What if their physical implications did differ in some subtle way that we had missed? When we showed our results to Yau, for example, he politely but firmly claimed that we must have made an error; he asserted that from a mathematical standpoint our results were far too outlandish to be true. His assessment gave us substantial pause. It's one thing to make a mistake in a small or modest claim that attracts little attention. Our result, though, was suggesting an unexpected step in a new direction that would certainly engender a strong response. If it were wrong, everyone would know.
Finally, after much checking and rechecking, our confidence grew and we sent our paper off for publication. A few days later, I was sitting in my office at Harvard and the phone rang. It was Philip Candelas from the University of Texas, and he immediately asked me if I was seated. I was.
He then told me that he and two of his students, Monika Lynker and Rolf Schimmrigk, had found something that was going to knock me off of my chair. By carefully examining a huge sample set of Calabi-Yau spaces that they had generated by computer, they found that almost all came in pairs differing precisely by the interchange of the number of even and odd holes. I told him that I was still seated—that Plesser and I had found the same result. Candelas's and our work turned out to be complementary; we had gone one step further by showing that all of the resulting physics in a mirror pair was identical, whereas Candelas and his students had shown that a significantly larger sample of Calabi-Yau shapes fell into mirror pairs. Through the two papers, we had discovered the mirror symmetry of string theory.7
The Physics and the Mathematics of Mirror Symmetry
The loosening of Einstein's rigid and unique association between the geometry of space and observed physics is one of the striking paradigm shifts of string theory. But these developments entail far more than a change in philosophical stance. Mirror symmetry, in particular, provides a powerful tool for understanding both the physics of string theory and the mathematics of Calabi-Yau spaces.
Mathematicians working in a field called algebraic geometry had been studying Calabi-Yau spaces for purely mathematical reasons long before string theory was discovered. They had worked out many of the detailed properties of these geometrical spaces without an inkling of a future physical application. Certain aspects of Calabi-Yau spaces, however, had proven difficult—essentially impossible—for mathematicians to unravel fully. But the discovery of mirror symmetry in string theory changed this significantly. In essence, mirror symmetry proclaims that particular pairs of Calabi-Yau spaces, pairs that were previously thought to be completely unrelated, are now intimately connected by string theory. They are linked by the common physical universe each implies if either is the one selected for the extra curled-up dimensions. This previously unsuspected interconnection provides an incisive new physical and mathematical tool.
Imagine, for instance, that you are busily calculating the physical properties—particle masses and force charges—associated with one possible Calabi-Yau choice for the extra dimensions. You are not particularly concerned with matching your detailed results with experiment, since as we have seen a number of theoretical and technological obstacles make doing this quite difficult at present. Instead, you are working through a thought experiment concerned with what the world would look like if a particular Calabi-Yau space were selected. For a while, everything is going along fine, but then, in the midst of your work, you come upon a mathematical calculation of insurmountable difficulty. No one, not even the world's most expert mathematicians, can figure out how to proceed. You are stuck. But then you realize that this Calabi-Yau has a mirror partner. Since the resulting string physics associated with each member of a mirror pair is identical, you recognize that you are free to do your calculations making use of either. And so, you rephrase the difficult calculation on the original Calabi-Yau space in terms of a calculation on its mirror, assured that the result of the calculation—the physics—will be the same. At first sight you might think that the rephrased version of the calculation will be as difficult as the original. But here you come upon a pleasant and powerful surprise: You discover that although the result will be the same, the detailed form of the calculation is very different, and in some cases the horribly difficult calculation you started with turns into an extremely easy calculation on the mirror Calabi-Yau space. There is no simple explanation for why this happens, but—at least for certain calculations—it most definitely does, and the decrease in level of difficulty can be dramatic. The implication, of course, is clear: You are no longer stuck.
It's somewhat as if someone requires you to count exactly the number of oranges that are haphazardly jumbled together in an enormous bin, some 50 feet on each side and 10 feet deep. You start to count them one by one, but soon realize that the task is just too laborious. Luckily, though, a friend comes along who was present when the oranges were delivered. He tells you that they arrived neatly packed in smaller boxes (one of which he just happens to be holding) that when stacked were 20 boxes long, by 20 boxes deep, by 20 boxes high. You quickly calculate that they arrived in 8,000 boxes, and that all you need to do is figure out how many oranges are packed in each. This you easily do by borrowing your friend's box and filling it with oranges, allowing you to finish your huge counting task with almost no effort. In essence, by cleverly reorganizing the calculation, you were able to make it substantially easier to accomplish.
The situation with numerous calculations in string theory is similar. From the perspective of one Calabi-Yau space, a calculation might involve an enormous number of difficult mathematical steps. By translating the calculation to its mirror, though, the calculation is reorganized in a far more efficient manner, allowing it to be completed with relative ease. This point was made by Plesser and me, and was impressively put into practice in subsequent work by Candelas with his collaborators Xenia de la Ossa and Linda Parkes, from the University of Texas, and Paul Green, from the University of Maryland. They showed that calculations of almost unimaginable difficulty coul
d be accomplished by using the mirror perspective, with a few pages of algebra and a desktop computer.
This was an especially exciting development for mathematicians, because some of these calculations were precisely the ones they had been stuck on for many years. String theory—or so the physicists claimed—had beaten them to the solution.
Now you should bear in mind that there is a good deal of healthy and generally good-natured competition between mathematicians and physicists. And as it turns out, two Norwegian mathematicians—Geir Ellingsrud and Stein Arilde Strømme—happened to be working on one of numerous calculations that Candelas and his collaborators had successfully conquered with mirror symmetry. Roughly speaking, it amounted to calculating the number of spheres that could be "packed" inside a particular Calabi-Yau space, somewhat like our analogy of counting oranges in a large bin. At a meeting of physicists and mathematicians in Berkeley in 1991, Candelas announced the result reached by his group using string theory and mirror symmetry: 317,206,375. Ellingsrud and Strømme announced the result of their very difficult mathematical calculation: 2,682,549,425. For days, mathematicians and physicists debated: Who was right? The question turned into a real litmus test of the quantitative reliability of string theory. A number of people even commented—somewhat in jest—that this test was the next best thing to being able to compare string theory with experiment. Moreover, Candelas's results went far beyond the single numerical result that Ellingsrud and Strømme claimed to have calculated. He and his collaborators claimed to have also answered many other questions that were tremendously more difficult—so difficult in fact, that no mathematician had ever even attempted to address them. But could the string theory results be trusted? The meeting ended with a great deal of fruitful exchange between mathematicians and physicists, but no resolution of the discrepancy.
About a month later, an e-mail message was widely circulated among participants in the Berkeley meeting with the subject heading Physics Wins! Ellingsrud and Strømme had found an error in their computer code that, when corrected, confirmed Candelas's result. Since then, there have been many mathematical checks on the quantitative reliability of the mirror symmetry of string theory: It has passed all with flying colors. Even more recently, almost a decade after physicists discovered mirror symmetry, mathematicians have made great progress in revealing its inherent mathematical foundations. By utilizing substantial contributions of the mathematicians Maxim Kontsevich, Yuri Manin, Gang Tian, Jun Li, and Alexander Givental, Yau and his collaborators Bong Lian and Kefeng Liu have finally found a rigorous mathematical proof of the formulas used to count spheres inside Calabi-Yau spaces, thereby solving problems that have puzzled mathematicians for hundreds of years.
Beyond the particulars of this success, what these developments really highlight is the role that physics has begun to play in modern mathematics. For quite some time, physicists have "mined" mathematical archives in search of tools for constructing and analyzing models of the physical world. Now, through the discovery of string theory, physics is beginning to repay the debt and to provide mathematicians with powerful new approaches to their unsolved problems. String theory not only provides a unifying framework for physics, but it may well forge an equally deep union with mathematics as well.
Chapter 11: Tearing the Fabric of Space:
If you relentlessly stretch a rubber membrane, sooner or later it will tear. This simple fact has inspired numerous physicists over the years to ask whether the same might be true of the spatial fabric making up the universe. That is, can the fabric of space rip apart, or is this merely a misguided notion that arises from taking the rubber membrane analogy too seriously?
Einstein's general relativity says no, the fabric of space cannot tear.1 The equations of general relativity are firmly rooted in Riemannian geometry and, as we noted in the preceding chapter, this is a framework that analyzes distortions in the distance relations between nearby locations in space. In order to speak meaningfully about these distance relations, the underlying mathematical formalism requires that the substrate of space is smooth—a term with a technical mathematical meaning, but whose everyday usage captures its essence: no creases, no punctures, no separate pieces "stuck" together, and no tears. Were the fabric of space to develop such irregularities, the equations of general relativity would break down, signaling some or other variety of cosmic catastrophe—a disastrous outcome that our apparently well-behaved universe avoids.
This has not kept imaginative theorists over the years from pondering the possibility that a new formulation of physics that goes beyond Einstein's classical theory and incorporates quantum physics might show that rips, tears, and mergers of the spatial fabric can occur. In fact, the realization that quantum physics leads to violent short-distance undulations led some to speculate that rips and tears might be a commonplace microscopic feature of the spatial fabric. The concept of wormholes (a notion with which any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is familiar) makes use of such musings. The idea is simple: Imagine you're the CEO of a major corporation with headquarters on the ninetieth floor of one of New York City's World Trade Center towers. Through the vagaries of corporate history, an arm of your company with which you need to have ever increasing contact is ensconced on the ninetieth floor of the other tower. As it is impractical to move either office, you come up with a natural suggestion: Build a bridge from one office to the other, connecting the two towers. This allows employees to move freely between the offices without having to go down and then up ninety floors.
A wormhole plays a similar role: It is a bridge or tunnel that provides a shortcut from one region of the universe to another. Using a two-dimensional model, imagine that a universe is shaped as in Figure 11.1.
If your corporate headquarters are located near the lower circle in 11.1 (a), you can get to your field office, located near the upper circle, only by traversing the entire U-shaped path, taking you from one end of the universe to another. But if the fabric of space can tear, developing punctures as in 11.1(b), and if these punctures can "grow" tentacles that merge together as in 11.1(c), a spatial bridge would connect the previously remote regions. This is a wormhole. You should note that the wormhole has some similarity to the World Trade Center bridge, but there is one essential difference: The World Trade Center bridge would traverse a region of existing space—the space between the two towers. On the contrary, the wormhole creates a new region of space, since the curved two-dimensional space in Figure 11.1(a) is all there is (in the setting of our two-dimensional analogy). Regions lying off of the membrane merely reflect the inadequacy of the illustration, which depicts the U-shaped universe as if it were an object within our higher-dimensional universe. The wormhole creates new space and therefore blazes new spatial territory
Do wormholes exist in the universe? No one knows. And if they do, it is far from clear whether they would take on only a microscopic form or if they could span vast regions of the universe (as in Deep Space Nine). But one essential element in assessing whether they are fact or fiction is determining whether or not the fabric of space can tear.
Black holes provide another compelling example in which the fabric of space is stretched to its limits. In Figure 3.7, we saw that the enormous gravitational field of a black hole results in such extreme curvature that the fabric of space appears to be pinched or punctured at the black hole's center. Unlike in the case of wormholes, there is strong experimental evidence supporting the existence of black holes, so the question of what really happens at their central point is one of science, not speculation. Once again, the equations of general relativity break down under such extreme conditions. Some physicists have suggested that there really is a puncture, but that we are protected from this cosmic "singularity" by the event horizon of the black hole, which prevents anything from escaping its gravitational grip. This reasoning led Roger Penrose of Oxford University to speculate on a "cosmic censorship hypothesis" that allows these kinds of spatial irregularities to occur only if they are
deeply hidden from our view behind the shroud of an event horizon. On the other hand, prior to the discovery of string theory, some physicists surmised that a proper merger of quantum mechanics and general relativity would show that the apparent puncture of space is actually smoothed out—"sewn up," so to speak—by quantum considerations.
With the discovery of string theory and the harmonious merger of quantum mechanics and gravity, we are finally poised to study these issues. As yet, string theorists have not been able to answer them fully, but during the last few years closely related issues have been solved. In this chapter we discuss how string theory, for the first time, definitively shows that there are physical circumstances—differing from wormholes and black holes in certain ways—in which the fabric of space can tear.
