I have yearned, for as long as I can remember, to be rich and famous. Some might find that ambition meritorious. Others might consider it a character flaw. Myself? I believe it’s neither. These goals were the inevitable result of a childhood less misspent than mistreated.
From an early age, my interests included Egyptology and physics, philology and philately. I was as scrawny, pale, and bookish a child as those enthusiasms would imply. Nor did it work in my favor that, outside of comic books, for decades surely no one else had been named Archie.33 Of course I spent my early school years terrorized. Often, as “mummy’s boy.”
And there was never a Veronica.
Admittedly, to refer to philately, rather than stamp collecting, was a choice. A poor choice, at that, as my tormentors were inclined to, ahem, stamp on me. Arguably it didn’t help that, from my crumpled defensive posture on the ground, through gritted teeth, I would deride their conflation of stamp and stomp. A tormented youth will find solace where he may.
And so: fame and fortune. I would show them all!
I grew into a tall, spare adult—albeit one with never anything to spare. And when I became afflicted with Sjogren’s syndrome, with its attendant dry mouth, dry nose, dry eyes, et alia, desert digs and Egyptology became impractical as a career path. Somebody else, I realized, must become the next Howard Carter, and I turned all my attention to physics. A nerd, many would say.
I wear the label with pride.
~~~
Even among physicists, my chosen specialty was esoteric.
String theory began in the attempt to understand the composition of protons and neutrons. When a superior approach—quantum chromodynamics, if you care to know—came along for that purpose, some of us were loath to abandon what we had begun. The mathematics of string theory were just so beautiful.
Beauty? What has that to do with anything? Einstein is said to have remarked, upon the first experimental confirmation of his General Relativity, that “had the data turned out differently, I would have been sorry for the Dear Lord, because the theory was correct.” General Relativity was simply too mathematically elegant, too beautiful, to be in error. And for more than a century General Relativity has remained a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe, underpinning everything we think we understand about gravity: from a falling apple to the orbits of the planets to the stately rotation of galaxies.
Fame and fortune? I will get there. Have patience.
~~~
Quantum Mechanics is also a century old and likewise fundamental. It describes, with exquisite precision, behaviors in the atomic and subatomic realms. Practically every gadget of modern life derives from quantum mechanics. Alas, it and General Relativity, the two great scientific theories of our age, are incompatible. One of these intellectual edifices, if not both, is built upon sand.
Physicists like me, for whom the mathematics of string theory were too beautiful not to embody some truth, saw a wondrous opportunity in this incompatibility. What we had undertaken for an entirely different purpose could be repurposed. We would reconcile the two great, foundational theories: GR and QM. Establish a quantum explanation for gravity. Resolve a scientific conundrum that had stymied Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and countless lesser lights.
“All” that was required was reimagining the familiar elementary particle types, such as the electron. Rather than dimensionless points, these particles would be vibrational modes of invisibly short, one-dimensional strings. Pure tones on the infinitesimal violins of the subatomic world. Oh, and we’d have to find a note for gravitons, a particle type that has never been seen.
How hard could it be?
~~~
With string theory, we—make that, I—would construct the Theory of Everything.
Here was the road—beyond mere fame—to the pantheon. To be remembered, forever, spoken of, forever, alongside Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. A Nobel Prize in physics would be the least of the recognitions.
And fortune? Inevitably, that, too. An endowed chair in physics at any university I might choose to grace with my presence. Whatever speaking honoraria I deigned to accept. Think-tank sinecures and marquee board-of-director positions for the hinting. The not insignificant monetary aspect of the Nobel. As surely, a MacArthur Genius Grant.
Only string theory became the road to... too many places.
~~~
To unify the two great theories of modern physics, beautiful mathematics insisted that the three familiar spatial dimensions plus time (or as Einstein more precisely had it: four dimensions of space-time) cannot suffice. There must be extra dimensions. These, the math tells us, are too compactly curled up upon themselves, or upon one another, for us to experience.
For a halcyon few days, we theorists could envision but a handful of ways in which the math allowed such hidden dimensions to enfold and entangle. And we vied to be the one to deduce a way to select the correct solution. To be the first to know the one true description of how the actual universe functioned.
All too soon, alas, mathematics pointed the way to hundreds, then thousands, then myriads of permissible solutions. The set of solutions grew to 101000 possibilities. Ten followed by a thousand zeroes. A gamut of possibilities that far, far, far exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. A value that is, in a word, ridiculous.
~~~
And yet.
Like Einstein with his General Relativity, our community could not escape seeing our mathematics as beautiful and compelling. Alas, neither beautiful nor compelling equates to convergent. Hence:
We gave up on a theory, to speak, grandiosely, of a landscape of possible string theories.
Or we made a conceptual leap to an even bolder—but also unseen—geometry: a universe of multidimensional membranes, or “branes,” afloat in some yet higher-dimensional space. Just as a geometric point is, in some abstract sense, the limiting case of a line segment, our theoretical strings became a one-dimensional, limiting case of a brane.
Or we took recourse to an inconceivably vast multiverse, in which would be instantiated—somewhere—every conceivable combination of all possible physical laws.
Via these ingenious contrivances, these heady flights of creativity, applying mathematics that were ever more beautiful, we rationalized away that one thing we failed to do: elucidate the features of the single known universe and its physical laws. Because when anything and everything is possible, nothing requires further explanation. What you find just is.
And so it was, across the decades, that for all our theorizing and philosophizing, string theory offered to the experimental physicists not a single testable prediction.
~~~
Has my life’s work seemed... obscure? Abstruse? Arcane?
You would have ample company in feeling so. Behind our backs, more and more, even many among our fellow physicists began to doubt. To differ. Some, to snicker.
And so—like a distorted echo, a funhouse-mirror reflection, of my tormented youth—the whispered gibes began. That string theorists were “knotheads” or “brane dead.” That of course we had yet to demonstrate anything, confronting as we were such “knotty problems.” That our entire approach was “string-cheesy.” That rather than doing physics, our days were spent “having fun with numbers.” That surely we would “solve this Gordian knot, as soon as we found our misplaced eleven-dimensional swords.” And the unkindest cut of all: That string theory was so misguided, it was not even wrong.
And over the years, unsurprisingly, our community experienced a brane drain....
~~~
Fame? Hardly! In the larger world, I could not have been more invisible. Even in my own shrinking community, at best I might claim credit for an insignificant portion of our collective futility. And fortune? That, too, for all my supposed intellect, eluded me. Rather, in my nomadic, untenured migration from university to university, I had settled into genteel poverty.
And as string theory continued on its serpentine journey to... nowhere, the witticisms proliferated. “So you’ve been stringing us along all this time?” “You spin quite the yarn. Ever so twisted a tale.” Or a personal favorite: “String theory: the tie that blinds.”
And yet.
I would pity the Lord, in whom I did not believe, if He had failed to erect the universe upon the foundation of our mathematics. There had to be truth in such beauty. Had to. Only where, in all the vaster than vast string-theory landscape, did I need to turn my gaze?
~~~
At long last, I fell upon an untried way to approach the problem.
Those invisibly compactified extra dimensions? They were commonly understood to be everywhere—but exactly how? Consider any location in recognizable and accessible 3D+1 space-time. Six or seven—opinions and maths differed on the exact number—additional dimensions were, in some way, imputed to that point. Only how were those unseen dimensions curled? coiled? knotted? folded? creased? spindled? mutilated? And with an infinity of such familiar points came an infinity of those beyond-Gordian knots.
But what if that perspective were mistaken? Were backward? What if, rather, our familiar, visible dimensions somehow enfolded, became congruent with, a single Gordian knot of those lurking dimensions? Would not such a geometry be—I knew no other word for it—beautiful?
The resulting mathematics were, in fact, so elegant, that even the most recalcitrant Lord must have embraced it. With lightning speed, I prepared a paper expounding this concept.
On the cusp of submitting the file to Physical Review Letters, I hesitated. Certainly, recognition must come of authoring it. Arguably fame, however fleeting, too. But my new mathematics would remain, among the skeptics, yet more mere fun with numbers.
~~~
Finally, the epiphany came. The single, universal knot I had envisioned—if only a person could make use of it—became a shortcut to... anywhere. And anywhen. How much more compelling would my paper become were it also to derive a means of access to that universal shortcut? Or, better yet, what if I could give an actual demonstration?
Easier said than done.
The quest continued. Weeks became months, and months became years, throughout which I sank ever deeper into penurious obscurity. And worse, into self-doubt. Were the cynics, skeptics, and comedians correct? Had it all been for knot?
Had my adult life been spent in so much mathturbation?
~~~
But at last, I found my answer and a means. Of sorts. Certainly a pop-in to the main vault at Fort Knox would make for a convincing display—
If not for a visitation likely to be well received.
With pellucid hindsight, I had begun to realize the implications of what I had achieved. How insights I had wrested from a secretive cosmos might be abused in the hands of madmen. Terrorists. Perverts. Governments. Thieves....
A Gordian knot, indeed.
The long years of toil. The long years of misguided hope. For fame and fortune? Quite the contrary. If I were to exercise even the least shred of self-restraint, fame and fortune must recede ever further from my grasp. Once more mummy boy had made an asp of himself.
Unless....
~~~
You will have read or heard of royal burial chambers despoiled of their legendary wealth over the millennia. Of hidden rooms, oftentimes sealed rooms, their treasures mysteriously pillaged by nameless tomb robbers. Have you ever wondered how?
Then wonder no more. The “mummy’s boy,” by unfolding the creases, became as rich as Croesus. At the expense of many a mummy.
So let us take stock.
Fortune? An epically large one (if, of necessity, maintained in a non-extradition country). So: check.
Ergo (in this materialistic age), fame: check.
Thus I find myself free to take up a new ambition. With fame and fortune to my credit, I am inclined to believe that I’m not too old to meet my Veronica.
And the odds are she will be beautiful.
[“I’ve Got the World on a String” first appeared in Galaxy’s Edge (January 2019).]
~~~
This short story falls into the personal-favorites category. Something in the collection had to represent my fondness for wordplay. “String” seemed like a fine choice.
Given that history as a calling was superseded by physics (for a few years, anyway, before giving way, in turn, to computer engineering), “String” also stands in for another of my longtime interests/obsessions: the fundamental nature of, well, everything. There’s quantum mechanics, of course. The math of QM seems correct—a bazillion transistors, diodes, and solid-state lasers produced each year from QM-based designs do, after all, work—but in that subatomic realm, what’s happening physically? After more than a century of trying, physicists can’t agree. (The Many Worlds hypothesis underpinning “My Fifth and Most Exotic Voyage” is only one of the candidate explanations.) And then, quantum mechanics being insufficiently esoteric for some, more recent theorists came up with string theory. Is string theory brilliantly insightful? Or, as in “String,” is it mere fun with numbers? No one knows.
Regardless (in my opinion, anyway), the story is fun.