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Chapter 7

The "Super" in Superstrings

When the success of Eddington's 1919 expedition to measure Einstein's prediction of the bending of starlight by the sun had
been established, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz sent Einstein a telegram informing him of the good news. As word of the
telegram's confirmation of general relativity spread, a student asked Einstein about what he would have thought if Eddington's
experiment had not found the predicted bending of starlight. Einstein replied, "Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, for
the theory is correct."49 Of course, had experiments truly failed to confirm Einstein's predictions, the theory would not be correct
and general relativity would not have become a pillar of modern physics. But what Einstein meant is that general relativity
describes gravity with such a deep inner elegance, with such simple yet powerful ideas, that he found it hard to imagine that nature
could pass it by. General relativity, in Einstein's view, was almost too beautiful to be wrong.

Aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse, however. Ultimately, theories are judged by how they fare when faced
with cold, hard, experimental facts. But this last remark is subject to an immensely important qualification. While a theory is being
constructed, its incomplete state of development often prevents its detailed experimental consequences from being assessed.
Nevertheless, physicists must make choices and exercise judgments about the research direction in which to take their partially
completed theory. Some of these decisions are dictated by internal logical consistency; we certainly require that any sensible theory
avoid logical absurdities. Other decisions are guided by a sense of the qualitative experimental implications of one theoretical
construct relative to another; we are generally not interested in a theory if it has no capacity to resemble anything we encounter in
the world around us. But it is certainly the case that some decisions made by theoretical physicists are founded upon an aesthetic
sense—a sense of which theories have an elegance and beauty of structure on par with the world we experience. Of course, nothing
ensures that this strategy leads to truth. Maybe, deep down, the universe has a less elegant structure than our experiences have led
us to believe, or maybe we will find that our current aesthetic criteria need significant refining when applied in ever less familiar
contexts. Nevertheless, especially as we enter an era in which our theories describe realms of the universe that are increasingly
difficult to probe experimentally, physicists do rely on such an aesthetic to help them steer clear of blind alleys and dead-end roads
that they might otherwise pursue. So far, this approach has provided a powerful and insightful guide.

In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics. But unlike the case in art, symmetry in physics has a very concrete and
precise meaning. In fact, by diligently following this precise notion of symmetry to its mathematical conclusion, physicists during
the last few decades have found theories in which matter particles and messenger particles are far more closely intertwined than
anyone previously thought possible. Such theories, which unite not only the forces of nature but also the material constituents, have
the greatest possible symmetry and for this reason have been called supersymmetric. Superstring theory, as we shall see, is both the
progenitor and the pinnacle example of a supersymmetric framework.

The Nature of Physical Law

Imagine a universe in which the laws of physics are as ephemeral as the tastes of fashion-changing from year to year, from week to
week, or even from moment to moment. In such a world, assuming that the changes do not disrupt basic life processes, you would
never experience a dull moment, to say the least. The simplest acts would be an adventure, since random variations would prevent
you or anyone else from using past experience to predict anything about future outcomes.

Such a universe is a physicist's nightmare. Physicists—and most everyone else as well—rely crucially upon the stability of the
universe: The laws that are true today were true yesterday and will still be true tomorrow (even if we have not been clever enough
to have figured them all out). After all, what meaning can we give to the term "law" if it can abruptly change? This does not mean
that the universe is static; the universe certainly changes in innumerable ways from each moment to the next. Rather, it means that
the laws governing such evolution are fixed and unchanging. You might ask whether we really know this to be true. In fact, we
don't. But our success in describing numerous features of the universe, from a brief moment after the big bang right through to the
present, assures us that if the laws are changing they must be doing so very slowly. The simplest assumption that is consistent with
all that we know is that the laws are fixed.

49
Albert Einstein, as quoted in R. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon Books, 1984), p. 287.