Hiding in the Mirror Read Free Page A

spans
both science and superstition. There is undoubtedly a deep need
within our psyches to believe in the existence of new realms where
our hopes and dreams might be fulfilled, and our worst nightmares
may lie buried.
    Religion is the most obvious manifestation of
this innate desire for a universe that may be far richer, and
perhaps kinder and gentler, than our material existence belies.
Nevertheless, while our longings for a deeper reality are in one
sense deeply spiritual, they transcend the purely spiritual. They
permeate all aspects of our culture, including the pursuit of
science. In order to separate science from superstition, we need to
recognize that, like Fox Mulder in The
X-Files, we all want to believe.
Forcing our beliefs to conform to the realities of nature, however,
rather than the other way around, is much more difficult and is
really, in my opinion, one of the greatest gifts that science can
provide our civilization. The process by which this transformation
from imagination to science is made is not always clear-cut,
especially when we are embroiled in the middle of it as we
certainly are now, at least as far as the possibility of new small
or large extra dimensions in nature is concerned. This book will in
part provide a timely snapshot of where we are now: of the physical
and mathematical motivations for our speculations, the sudden
rushes of clarity, and the many frustrating red herrings and dashed
expectations. The picture that is emerging is far from being in
focus, unlike much of what one might read in the popular press. But
not knowing all of the answers, and perhaps more importantly,
knowing that one does not know all of the answers, is what keeps
the search exciting.
    We shall encounter diverse manifestations,
developed over several centuries—in art, literature, and science—of
the idea that the three dimensions of space that we experience are
not all there is. But this topic has in recent years taken on a
special urgency, which is why I believe it is worth relating at
this time, in an honest way, to a broader audience. Dramatic new
theoretical ideas seem to suggest the existence of many extra
dimensions, and scientists are at this very moment struggling to
determine if they have any relation to the real world.
    It is worth stressing this last point. Too
often in the media, speculative ideas are treated on the same
footing as well-tested ones. As a result, it is sometimes hard to
tell the difference between them. This is particularly unfortunate
when firmly grounded ideas that are known to accurately describe the
physical world (such as evolution and the big bang) are passed off
as mere theoretical whims of a group of partisan scientists. One of
the most useful tasks a popular exposition of science at the
forefront can achieve, it seems to me, is clearly differentiate
that which we know yields an accurate description of nature on some
scale from those things we have reason to suspect one day might do so. And the worst thing
such an exposition can do is confuse the two. In the course of this
book I will also attempt to present a “fair and balanced” treatment
of string theory (in a “non–Fox News” sense)—the source of most of
the recent fascination with extra dimensions—and its offshoots. As
we shall see, there are many fascinating theoretical reasons for
physicists to be excited about working on these ideas. But that
should not obscure the important fact that string theory has yet to
demonstrate any definitive connection to the real world and, in
fact, is a theory that thus far has primarily succeeded in
generating more complex mathematics as time proceeds, any hype
notwithstanding.
    Because of the deeply ingrained nature of the
concepts I want to deal with here, while science will form the core
of our narrative thread, this book will present a broader history
of ideas. This cultural context for the notion of extra dimensions
is almost equally compelling, whether in literature or