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we have seen, the surprising answer to this question was that not much happens at all. For conifold transitions—the technical name
for the drastic space-tearing transitions we had now found—there is, once again, no physical catastrophe (as there would be in
conventional general relativity), but there are more pronounced observable consequences.

Two related notions underlie these observable consequences; we will explain each in turn. First, as we have discussed, Strominger's
initial breakthrough was his realization that a three-dimensional sphere inside a Calabi-Yau space can collapse without an ensuing
disaster, because a three-brane wrapped around it provides a perfect protective shield. But what does such a wrapped-brane
configuration look like? The answer comes from earlier work of Horowitz and Strominger, which showed that to persons such as
ourselves who are directly cognizant only of the three extended spatial dimensions, the three-brane "smeared" around the three-
dimensional sphere will set up a gravitational field that looks like that of a black hole.113 This is not obvious and becomes clear
only from a detailed study of the equations governing the branes. Again, it's hard to draw such higher-dimensional configurations
accurately on a page, but Figure 13.4 conveys the rough idea with a lower-dimensional analogy involving twodimensional spheres.
We see that a two-dimensional membrane can smear itself around a two-dimensional sphere (which itself is sitting inside a Calabi-
Yau space positioned at some location in the extended dimensions). Someone looking through the extended dimensions toward this
location will sense the wrapped brane by its mass and the force charges it carries, properties that Horowitz and Strominger had
shown would look just like those of a black hole. Moreover, in Strominger's 1995 breakthrough paper, he argued that the mass of
the three-brane—the mass of the black hole, that is—is proportional to the volume of the three-dimensional sphere it wraps: The
bigger the volume of the sphere, the bigger the three-brane must be in order to wrap around it, and the more massive it becomes.
Similarly, the smaller the volume of the sphere, the smaller the mass of the three-brane that wraps it. As this sphere collapses, then,
a three-brane that wraps around the sphere,
which is perceived as a black hole, appears to
become ever lighter. When the three-
dimensional sphere has collapsed to a pinched
point, the corresponding black hole—brace
yourself—is massless. Although it sounds
completely mysterious—what in the world is a
massless black hole?—we will soon connect this
enigma with more familiar string physics.

The second ingredient we need to recall is that

the number of holes in a Calabi-Yau shape, as
discussed in Chapter 9, determines the number
of low-energy, and hence low-mass, vibrational
string patterns, the patterns that can possibly
account for the particles in Table 1.1 as well as
the force carriers. Since the space-tearing
Figure 13.4 When a brane wraps around a sphere that is within the curled-
conifold transitions change the number of holes
up dimensions, it appears as a black hole in the familiar extended
(as, for example in Figure 13.3, in which the
hole of the doughnut is eliminated by the tearing/repairing process), we expect a change in the number of low-mass vibrational
patterns. Indeed, when Morrison, Strominger, and I studied this in detail, we found that as a new two-dimensional sphere replaces
the pinched three-dimensional sphere in the curled-up Calabi-Yau dimensions, the number of massless string vibrational patterns
increases by exactly one. (The example of the doughnut turning into a beach ball in Figure 13.3 would lead you to believe that the
number of holes—and thus the number of patterns—decreases, but this proves to be a misleading property of the lower-
dimensional analogy.)

To combine the observations of the preceding two paragraphs, imagine a sequence of snapshots of a Calabi-Yau space in which the
size of a particular three-dimensional sphere gets smaller and smaller. The first observation implies that a three-brane wrapping
around this three-dimensional sphere—which appears to us as a black hole—will have ever smaller mass until, at the final point of
collapse, it will be massless. But, as we asked above, what does this mean? The answer became clear to us by invoking the second
observation. Our work showed that the new massless pattern of string vibration arising from the space-tearing conifold transition is
the microscopic description of a massless particle into which the black hole has transmuted. We concluded that as a Calabi-Yau
shape goes through a space-tearing conifold transition, an initially massive black hole becomes ever lighter until it is massless and
then it transmutes into a massless particle—such as a massless photon—which in string theory is nothing but a single string
executing a particular vibrational pattern. In this way, for the first time, string theory explicitly establishes a direct, concrete, and
quantitatively unassailable connection between black holes and elementary particles.

113
More precisely, these are examples of extremal black holes: black holes that have the minimum mass consistent with the force charges they carry, just like the BPS states in Chapter
12. Similar black holes will also play a pivotal role in the following discussion on black hole entropy.