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tough, muscular girth that he feels. The third blind man grabs hold of the elephant's tail and describes the slender and sinewy
appendage that he feels. Since their mutual descriptions are so different, and since none of the men can see the others, each thinks
that he has grabbed hold of a different animal. For many years, physicists were as much in the dark as the blind men, thinking that
the different string theories were very different. But now, through the insights of the second superstring revolution, physicists have
realized that M-theory is the unifying pachyderm of the five string theories.

In this chapter we have discussed changes in our understanding of string theory that arise when we venture beyond the domain of
the perturbative framework—a framework implicitly in use prior to this chapter. Figure 12.9 summarizes the interrelations we have
found so far, with arrows to indicate dual theories. As you can see, we have a web of connections, but it is not yet complete. By
also including the dualities of
Chapter 10, we can finish the job.

Recall the large/small circular

radius duality that interchanges a
circular dimension of radius R
with one whose radius is 1/R. Figure 12.9 The arrows show which theories are dual to others.
Previously, we glossed over one
aspect of this duality, which we now must clarify. In Chapter 10, we discussed the properties of strings in a universe with a circular
dimension without carefully specifying which of the five string formulations we were working with. We argued that the
interchange of winding and vibration modes of a string allows us to rephrase exactly the string theoretic description of a universe
with a circular dimension of radius 1/R in terms of one in which the radius is R. The point we glossed over is that the Type IIA and
Type IIB string theories actually get exchanged by this duality, as do the Heterotic-O and Heterotic-E strings. That is, the more
precise statement of the large/small radius duality is this: The physics of the Type IIA string in a universe with a circular dimension
of radius R is absolutely identical to the physics of the Type IIB string in a universe with a circular dimension of radius 1/R (a
similar statement holds for the Heterotic-E and Heterotic-O strings). This refinement of the large/small radius duality has no
significant effect on the conclusions of Chapter 10, but it does have an important impact on the present discussion.

The reason is that by providing a

link between the Type IIA and
Type IIB string theories, as well
as between the Heterotic-O and
Heterotic-E theories, the
large/small radius duality
completes the web of
connections, as illustrated by the Figure 12.10 By including the dualities involving the geometrical form of spacetime (as in
dotted lines in Figure 12.10. This Chapter 10), all five of the string theories and M theory are joined together in a web of
figure shows that all five string dualities.
theories, together with M-theory,
are dual to one another. They are all sewn together into a single theoretical framework; they provide five different approaches to
describing one and the same underlying physics. For some or other application, one phrasing may be far more effective than
another. For instance, it's far easier to work with the weakly coupled Heterotic-O theory than it is to work with the strongly coupled
Type I string. Nevertheless, they describe exactly the same physics.

The Overall Picture

We can now more fully understand the two figures—Figures 12.1 and 12.2—that we introduced in the beginning of this chapter to
summarize the essential points. In Figure 12.1 we see that prior to 1995, without taking any dualities into account, we had five
apparently distinct string theories. Various physicists worked on each, but without an understanding of the dualities they appeared
to be different theories. Each of the theories had variable features such as the size of their coupling constant and the geometrical
form and sizes of curled-up dimensions. The hope was (and still is) that these defining properties would be determined by the
theory itself, but without the ability to determine them with the current approximate equations, physicists have naturally studied the
physics that follows from a range of possibilities. This is represented in Figure 12.1 by the shaded regions—each point in such a
region denotes one specific choice for the coupling constant and the curled-up geometry. Without invoking any dualities, we still
have five disjointed (collections of) theories.

But now, if we apply all of the dualities we have discussed, then as we vary the coupling and geometric parameters, we can pass
from any one theory to any other, so long as we also include the unifying central region of M-theory; this is shown in Figure 12.2.