X-Message-Number: 11574
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 17:57:54 +0000
From: Damien Broderick <>
Subject: THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE & the paradigm conflict

Supersymmetric string theory, especally in the late-'90s version `second
revolution' form developed by Edward Witten and colleagues, looks set to
combine quantum field theory and Relativity handily and without vexatious
contradictions. A very fine new book (I recommend it) is THE ELEGANT
UNIVERSE, by Briane Greene (Jonathan Cape British hc, 1999).  It's the best
popular and accessible treatment of superstring theory I've seen.  The new
and very powerful M-Theory, as everyone here surely knows, neatly combines
Type I, Type II B, Type II A, Heterotic-O(32) and Heterotic-E8xE8 string
theories as variants, along with 11-D Supergravity, of a single general
membrane theory of fundamental particles and forces. 

You all thought no-one would ever fit them together!  Ha!  Think again,
cynics!  Anyone who hopes to say anything intelligible and interesting
about the basic laws of spacetime, circa 1999 model, could usefully read
this book.  Your next dinner party could be spiced up with amusing remarks
about the Euler values of variant Calabi-Yau spaces, and Orbifolds in a
high-order Kaluza-Klein manifold.
Dazzle your friends!  More hilarious than tachyons!  More plausible than
twistors!  

And it's given me some very cute ideas for sf stories, which is what's
*really* important about science, of course.  (There's no Big Crunch, for
starters, even if the universe turns out to be contracting after all -
strings provide a bounce at the Planck scale.  And any description of a
closed dimensional space that's very large and expanding is also just as
legitimately described as very small and contracting - read the book, you
doubters - which leads me to wonder if a syllogismobile might get us from
here to someway far off by a mirror translation into a transform where
everything is *already* close together.) 

Damien Broderick

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