-- 99 --

We non-string theorists have not made any progress whatsoever in the last decade. So the argument that string
theory is the only game in town is a very strong and powerful one. There are questions that will not be answered
in the framework of conventional quantum field theory. That much is clear. They may be answered by something
else, and the only something else I know of is string theory.78

Georgi reflects back on the 1980s in much the same way:

At various times in its early history, string theory has gotten oversold. In the intervening years I have found that
some of the ideas of string theory have led to interesting ways of thinking about physics which have been useful
to me in my own work. I am much happier now to see people spending their time on string theory since I can
now see how something useful will come out of it.79

Theorist David Gross, a leader in both conventional and string physics, has eloquently summed up the situation in the following
way:

It used to be that as we were climbing the mountain of nature the experimentalists would lead the way. We lazy
theorists would lag behind. Every once in a while they would kick down an experimental stone which would
bounce off our heads. Eventually we would get the idea and we would follow the path that was broken by the
experimentalists. Once we joined our friends we would explain to them what the view was and how they got
there. That was the old and easy way (at least for theorists) to climb the mountain. We all long for the return of
those days. But now we theorists might have to take the lead. This is a much more lonely enterprise.80

String theorists have no desire for a solo trek to the upper reaches of Mount Nature; they would far prefer to share the burden and
the excitement with experimental colleagues. It is merely a technological mismatch in our current situation—a historical
asynchrony—that the theoretical ropes and crampons for the final push to the top have at least been partially fashioned, while the
experimental ones do not yet exist. But this does not mean that string theory is fundamentally divorced from experiment. Rather,
string theorists have high hopes of "kicking down a theoretical stone" from the ultra-high-energy mountaintop to experimentalists
working at a lower base camp. This is a prime goal of present-day research in string theory. No stones have as yet been dislodged
from the summit to be sent hurtling down, but, as we now discuss, a few tantalizing and promising pebbles certainly have.

The Road to Experiment

Without monumental technological breakthroughs, we will never be able to focus on the tiny length scales necessary to see a string
directly. Physicists can probe down to a billionth of a billionth of a meter with accelerators that are roughly a few miles in size.
Probing smaller distances requires higher energies and this means larger machines capable of focusing that energy on a single
particle. As the Planck length is some 17 orders of magnitude smaller than what we can currently access, using today's technology
we would need an accelerator the size of the galaxy to see individual strings. In fact, Shmuel Nussinov of Tel Aviv University has
shown that this rough estimate based on straightforward scaling is likely to be overly optimistic; his more careful study indicates
that we would require an accelerator the size of the whole universe. (The energy required to probe matter at the Planck length is
roughly equal to a thousand kilowatt-hours—the energy needed to run an average air conditioner for about one hundred hours—
and so is not particularly outlandish. The seemingly insurmountable technological challenge is to focus all of this energy on a
single particle, that is, on a single string.) As the U.S. Congress ultimately canceled funding for the Superconducting
Supercollider—an accelerator a "mere" 54 miles in circumference—don't hold your breath while waiting for the money for a
Planck-probing accelerator. If we are going to test string theory experimentally, it will have to be in an indirect manner. We will
have to determine physical implications of string theory that can be observed on length scales that are far larger than the size of a
string itself.81

78
Interview with Sheldon Glashow, December 28, 1997.
79
Interview with Howard Georgi, December 28, 1997. During the interview, Georgi also noted that the experimental refutation of the prediction of proton decay that emerged from his
and Glashow's first proposed grand unified theory (see Chapter 7) played a significant part in his reluctance to embrace superstring theory. He noted poignantly that his grand unified
theory invoked a vastly higher energy realm than any theory previously considered, and when its prediction was proved wrong—when it resulted in his "being slapped down by nature"—
his attitude toward studying extremely high energy physics abruptly changed. When I asked him whether experimental confirmation of his grand unified theory might have inspired him to
lead the charge to the Planck scale, he responded, "Yes, it likely would have."
80
David Gross, "Superstrings and Unification," in Proceedings of the XXIV International Conference on High Energy Physics, ed. R. Kotthaus and J. Kühn (Berlin: Springer-Verlag,
1988), p. 329.
81
Having said this, it's worth bearing in mind the long-shot possibility, pointed out in endnote 8 of Chapter 6, that strings just might be significantly longer than originally thought and
therefore might be subject to direct experimental observation by accelerators within a few decades.