Supplemental Material

Thus:
gravitons) exert an influence at distances much larger than the subatomic realm, as anyone who has fallen down a flight of stairs can attest. But only at an extremely small scale - the Planck length of 10^-33 centimeters - does the quantum nature of gravity become important.

Suppose you could magically look through a microscope that magnified an atomic nucleus to be some 10 light-years across. Under this magnification the smallest gravitons - that is, the most energetic and massive ones - would be about a millimeter in size. Here we might see a strange world in which space-time itself was defined by gravitons intersecting and looping around each other. In a similar vein, Roger Penrose has suggested that the gravitational field and space-time are built up from still more primitive mathematical entities called twistors, and that "ultimately the [space-time] concept may possibly be eliminated from the basis of physical theory altogether." In essence, space and time become factored out as less- than-fundamental parts of the physical world.

In such a view, only the interactions between twistors, or perhaps gravitons, define when and where space-time is and is not. Are there gaps in the physical vacuum, voids of true and absolute nothing where space and time themselves do not exist?

Another viewpoint on the structure of space-time is offered by "superstring theory." String theories posit that the fundamental objects of nature are one-dimensional lines rather than points; the "elementary" particles we measure are only oscillations of these strings. Superstring theory only seems to work, however, if space-time has not just four dimensions (three of space and one of time), but 10 dimensions. This hardly seems like the world we live in. To hide the extra six dimensions, mathematicians roll them up into conceptual corners that go by such cryptic names as "Calabi-Yau manifolds" and "orbifold space." A recent textbook on the subject concludes on a wistful note that "if the string idea is correct, we may never catch more than a glimpse of the full extent of reality."

More recently, theorists Carlo Rovelli (University of Pittsburgh) and Lee Smolin (Pennsylvania State University) completed their analysis of a quantum gravity model developed by Abhay Ashtekar at Syracuse University in 1985. Unlike string theory, Ashtekar's work applies only to gravity. However, it posits that at the Planck scale, space-time dissolves into a network of "loops" that are held together by knots. Somewhat like a chain-mail coat used by knights of yore, space-time resembles a fabric fashioned in four dimensions from these tiny one-dimensional loops and knots of energy.

Is this the way the world really is on its most fundamental level, or have> mathematicians become detached from reality? Superstring theory has enticed physicists for over a decade now because it hints at a super unification of all four fundamental forces of nature. But it remains frustratingly hard to plant anchors down from these cloud castles into the real world of observation and experiment. The famous remark that superstring theory is "a piece of 21st- century physics that accidentally fell into the 20th century" captures both the excitement and frustration of workers stuck with 20th-century tools.

Surprisingly, string theory, Ashtekar's loopy space-time, and twistors are not entirely independent ways of looking at space-time. In 1986 theorists discovered that superstrings have some things in common with twistors. A deep connection had been uncovered between two very different, independent theories. Like two teams of tunnelers starting on opposite sides of a mountain, they had met at the middle - a sign, perhaps, that they are dealing with a single real mountain, not separate ones in their own imaginations. And in 1995 Rovelli and Smolin also found that their graviton loops are very closely related to both the twistors and superstrings, though not identical in all respects.

THE COSMIC CONNECTION

Space-time could be strange in other ways too. Theorist John A. Wheeler (In- stitute for Advanced Study) has long advocated that at the Planck scale, space-time has a complex shape that changes from instant to instant. Wheeler called his picture "space-time foam" - a sea of quantum black holes and worm holes appearing and vanishing on a time scale of about 10^-43" seconds. This is the Planck time, the time it takes light to cross the Planck length. Shorter than that, time, like space, presumably cannot exist - or, at least, our everyday notions of them cease to be valid.

Wheeler's idea of space-time foam is a natural extrapolation from the idea of virtual particles. According to quantum mechanics, the higher the energy and mass of a particle, the smaller it must appear. A virtual particle as small as 10^-33" cm, lasting only 10^-43 second, has so great a mass (10^-5 gram) in such a tiny volume that its own surface gravity would give it an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. In other words, it is a tiny black hole. But a black hole is not an ordinary object sitting in space- time like a particle; it is a structure of distorted, convoluted space-time itself. Although the consequences of such phe- nomena are not understood, it is reasonable to assume that these virtual particles dramatically distort all space-time at the Planck scale.