-- 148 --

This was a wonderful and important insight. But its full power was not revealed until a short time later.

Tearing the Fabric of Space—with Conviction

One of the most exciting things about physics is how the state of knowledge can change literally overnight. The morning after
Strominger posted his paper on the electronic Internet archive, I read it in my office at Cornell after having retrieved it from the
World Wide Web. In one stroke, Strominger had made use of the exciting new insights of string theory to resolve one of the
thorniest issues surrounding the curling up of extra dimensions into a Calabi-Yau space. But as I pondered his paper, it struck me
that he might have worked out only half of the story.

In the earlier space-tearing flop-transition work described in Chapter 11, we had studied a two-part process in which a two-
dimensional sphere pinches down to a point, causing the fabric of space to tear, and then the two-dimensional sphere reinflates in a
new way, thereby repairing the tear. In Strominger's paper, he had studied what happens when a three-dimensional sphere pinches
down to a point, and had shown that the newfound extended objects in string theory ensure that physics continues to be perfectly
well behaved. But that's where his paper stopped. Might it be that there was another half to the story, involving, once again, the
tearing of space and its subsequent repair through the reinflation of spheres?

Dave Morrison was visiting me at Cornell during the spring term of 1995, and that afternoon we got together to discuss
Strominger's paper. Within a couple of hours we had an outline of what the "second half of the story" might look like. Drawing on
some insights from the late 1980s of the mathematicians Herb Clemens of the University of Utah, Robert Friedman of Columbia
University, and Miles Reid of the University of Warwick, as applied by Candelas, Green, and Tristan Hübsch, then of the
University of Texas at Austin, we realized that when a three-dimensional sphere collapses, it may be possible for the Calabi-Yau
space to tear and subsequently repair itself by reinflating the sphere. But there is an important surprise. Whereas the sphere that
collapsed had three dimensions, the one that reinflates has only two. It's hard to picture what this looks like, but we can get an idea
by focusing on a lower-dimensional analogy. Rather than the hard-to-picture case of a three-dimensional sphere collapsing and
being replaced by a two-dimensional sphere, let's imagine a one-dimensional sphere collapsing and being replaced by a zero-
dimensional sphere.

First of all, what are one- and zero-dimensional spheres?

Well, let's reason by analogy. A two-dimensional sphere is
the collection of points in three-dimensional space that are
the same distance from a chosen center, as shown in Figure
13.2(a). By following the same idea, a one-dimensional
sphere is the collection of points in two-dimensional space
(the surface of this page, for example) that are the same
distance from a chosen center. As shown in Figure 13.2(b),
this is nothing but a circle. Finally, following the pattern, a Figure 13.2 Spheres of dimensions that can be easily visualized—
zero-dimensional sphere is the collection of points in a those of (a) two, (b) one, and (c) zero dimensions.
one-dimensional space (a line) that are the same distance
from a chosen center. As shown in Figure 13.2(c), this amounts to two points, with the "radius" of the zero-dimensional sphere
equal to the distance each point is from their common center. And so, the lower-dimensional analogy alluded to in the preceding
paragraph involves a circle (a one-dimensional sphere) pinching down, followed by space tearing, and then being replaced by a
zero-dimensional sphere (two points). Figure 13.3 puts this abstract idea into practice.

We imagine beginning with the

surface of a doughnut, in which
a one-dimensional sphere (a
circle) is embedded, as
highlighted in Figure 13.3.
Now, let's imagine that as time Figure 13.3 A circular piece of a doughnut (a torus) collapses to a point. The surface tears
goes by, the highlighted circle open, yielding two puncture holes. A zero-dimensional sphere (two points) is "glued in,"
collapses, causing the fabric of replacing the original one-dimensional sphere (the circle) and repairing the torn surface.
space to pinch. We can repair This allows the transformation to a completely different shape—a beach ball.
the pinch by allowing the fabric
to momentarily tear, and then replacing the pinched one-dimensional sphere—the collapsed circle—with a zero-dimensional
sphere-two points-plugging the holes in the upper and lower portions of the shape arising from the tear. As shown in Figure 13.3,
the resulting shape looks like a warped banana, which through gentle deformation (non-space tearing) can be reshaped smoothly