Rikai Funo · Track 7 · middle

Ode to String Theory

The fundamental constituents of reality are not particles but one-dimensional vibrating strings in ten or eleven dimensions, whose modes of vibration produce every particle and every force. M-Theory unifies the five string theories via eleven-dimensional supergravity and higher-dimensional branes. Untested, possibly untestable, and still possibly the only mathematically consistent candidate for quantum gravity. An ode to the theory too beautiful to abandon and too difficult to confirm.

Lyrics

The point particle cracked.
It broke open.
And inside, there was only a hum.

You weren't supposed to be for this.
A formula for the strong force, back in 1968.
Just a curiosity from Veneziano's notebook.
Then the wilderness years.
Until the blackboard at Caltech, 1984.
The air thick with chalk dust and erased equations.
Green and Schwarz, chasing the anomaly.
The hexagon diagrams that would kill you.
And the math said no, and no, and no, until suddenly...
It canceled.
Perfectly.
But only for SO(32).
Or E8 cross E8.
The universe, it seemed, had a preference.

Oh, you beautiful, catastrophic thing.
You string.
Not a dot, but a filament of vibrating light.
A mode of oscillation for the electron, a different one for the graviton.
Six dimensions curled up smaller than thought
in a Calabi-Yau manifold, a hidden knot.
And all the world, just a symphony played on a single, perfect string.

Then the five of you.
Type I, Type IIA, IIB.
The two Heterotics.
A family of rivals, a zoo of perfections.
Until Witten, in 1995, stood up and saw the mountain.
And you weren't five theories.
You were five viewpoints from the valley floor.
He took us up, to the eleventh floor.
To M-Theory. To the membrane, the D-brane.
The place where all your strings began.

Oh, you beautiful, catastrophic thing.
You string.
Not a dot, but a filament of vibrating light.
A mode of oscillation for the electron, a different one for the graviton.
Six dimensions curled up smaller than thought
in a Calabi-Yau manifold, a hidden knot.
And all the world, just a symphony played on a single, perfect string.

But the symphony has ten to the five hundred movements.
A landscape of universes, and we're lost in one.
No signpost home.
No signal from the compact dimensions.
Witten called you "21st-century physics."
Did you fall into our century by mistake?
Are you a theory of everything,
or a theory of anything?

We built you out of mathematics and faith.
A cathedral of pure reason.
Too beautiful to be wrong.
Too elegant to be real.