-- 162 --

ever hotter, and ever denser, as we move backward in time toward the bang. At time zero, as the size of the universe vanishes, the
temperature and density soar to infinity, giving us the most extreme signal that this theoretical model of the universe, firmly rooted
in the classical gravitational framework of general relativity, has completely broken down.

Nature is telling us
emphatically that under
such conditions we must
merge general relativity
and quantum mechanics—
in other words, we must
make use of string theory.
Currently, research on the
implications of string
theory for cosmology is at
an early stage of
development. Perturbative
methods can, at best, give
skeletal insights, since the
extremes of energy,
temperature, and density
require precision analysis.
Figure 14.1 A few significant events since the Big Bang.
Although the second
superstring revolution has
provided some nonperturbative techniques, it will be some time before they are honed for the kinds of calculations required in a
cosmological setting. Nevertheless, as we now discuss, during the last decade or so, physicists have taken the first steps toward
understanding string cosmology. Here is what they have found.

It appears that there are three essential ways in which string theory modifies the standard cosmological model. First, in a manner
that current research continues to clarify, string theory implies that the universe has what amounts to a smallest possible size. This
has profound consequences for our understanding of the universe at the moment of the bang itself, when the standard theory claims
that its size has shrunk all the way to zero. Second, string theory has a small-radius/large-radius duality (intimately related to its
having a smallest possible size), which also has deep cosmological significance, as we will see in a moment. Finally, string theory
has more than four spacetime dimensions, and from a cosmological standpoint, we must address the evolution of them all. Let's
discuss these points in greater detail.

In the Beginning There Was a Planck-Sized Nugget

In the late 1980s, Robert Brandenberger and Cumrun Vafa made the first important strides toward understanding how the
application of these string theoretic features modifies the conclusions of the standard cosmological framework. They came to two
important realizations. First, as we run the clock backward in time toward the beginning, the temperature continues to rise until the
size of the universe is about the Planck length in all directions. But then, the temperature hits a maximum and begins to decrease.
The intuitive reason behind this is not hard to come by. Imagine for simplicity (as Brandenberger and Vafa did) that all of the space
dimensions of the universe are circular. As we run the clock backward and the radius of each of these circles shrinks, the
temperature of the universe increases. But as each of the radii collapses toward and then through the Planck length, we know that,
within string theory, this is physically identical to the radii shrinking to the Planck length and then bouncing back toward
increasing size. Since temperature goes down as the universe expands, we would expect that the futile attempt to squeeze the
universe to sub-Planck size means that the temperature stops rising, hits a maximum, and then begins to decrease. Through detailed
calculations, Brandenberger and Vafa explicitly verified that indeed this is the case.

This led Brandenberger and Vafa to the following cosmological picture. In the beginning, all of the spatial dimensions of string
theory are tightly curled up to their smallest possible extent, which is roughly the Planck length. The temperature and energy are
high, but not infinite, since string theory has avoided the conundrums of an infinitely compressed zero-size starting point. At this
beginning moment of the universe, all the spatial dimensions of string theory are on completely equal footing—they are completely
symmetric—all curled up into a multidimensional, Planck-sized nugget. Then, according to Brandenberger and Vafa, the universe
goes through its first stage of symmetry reduction when, at about the Planck time, three of the spatial dimensions are singled out
for expansion, while all others retain their initial Planck-scale size. These three space dimensions are then identified with those in