During the academic year of 1991-92, I had the opportunity to spend a sabbatical year in Paris. During that time, my wife Adele and I were surprised to notice intense activity, in the form of books, conferences, and symposia, on the theme of “Science and Faith,” with the purpose of bringing them together after a long time of separation and antagonism. Significantly, this attempt toward reconciliation was beginning in France, the country that so much contributed to the dichotomy between the two in the first place.

Three books figure prominently in my present discussion about science and faith. The first, the best-selling God and Science,¹ consists of a dialogue between J. Guitton, a highly respected Catholic philosopher and a well-known member of the French National Academy, and Grichka and Igor Bogdanov, young scientists whose fields of research are in astrophysics. In the dialogue between Guitton and the Bogdanov brothers, the scientists answer the questions posed by the philosopher about the laws governing the natural world. Intriguing questions are addressed: “Where the universe came from? What is real? What are the relationships between conscience and matter? Why does anything exist at all?” In every instance the philosopher, who is also a believer in God and in the Bible, finds that the answers he receives from science give him comfort and strength in his faith. He finds no contradiction between the two; on the contrary, everything he hears about science strengthens his faith.

A collection of essays edited by Jean Delumeau, Le Savant et la Foi,² presents a similar theme. It consists of nineteen contributions from scientists, some of them highly reputed, who explain, in often touching terms, how they reconcile their faith with their scientific research. One of the essays is the result of a collaboration among some twenty scientists affiliated with the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay, Gif, Saclay, etc.), who hold monthly meetings to discuss issues of science and faith in relationship to their research.

A third book that attests to this renewed interest in the relationship between science and faith is another collection of essays, Can Scientists Believe?,³ written by scientists from different religious traditions and edited by Sir Neville Mott, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1977. In this book, Mott himself explains how he became a Christian at the age of fifty, when, as head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, in England, he was invited by the vicar of the university church to join other leading scientists in contributing to a lecture series there about science and religion. Being agnostic, he felt a need to do some reading before discussing something about which he knew very little, and this was the beginning of his conversion.

In January 1992, the Catholic newspaper La Croix organized its second conference on “Science and Faith,” a day-long conference which took place in a theater in Paris and was widely attended. Among the participants were scientists, theologians, historians, and philosophers, representing all the major religious traditions, and it included atheists of good will, who were open to dialogue. Some of the participants were people of high professional standing, members of the French Academy. The opening addresses were delivered by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, and Professor Hubert Curien, minister in the French government for scientific research.

The recurrent theme of all the contributions at the conference was “Scientism is dead.” In order to understand the significance of that pronouncement in the context of our discussion of spirituality and postmodernism, we must consider the historical development of science.

Modern science and Determinism

In the ancient and medieval worlds, science and religion were part of the same cultural heritage; one was unthinkable without the other. What happened later to cause the schism between them?

The story is well-known. Modern science developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), in the aftermath of a great period, the Italian Renaissance, during which attention shifted from God to humankind, from the supernatural to the natural.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, which saw such technological advances as electricity and the steam engine, which made such a deep impact in the life of the Western world, confidence in science was unlimited. There was a general feeling that science would ultimately solve all the problems of society and the human condition. Suffering, diseases, poverty-all these evils would sooner or later be eliminated by science and technology. There was no place for God. Human reason could reach the ultimate truth without the need of a supernatural power.

In philosophy these ideas culminated in schools of thought such as logical positivism, in which there was no room for a transcendent superior being. All these schools of thought are usually referred to under the general name of “scientism.” When, therefore, H. Curien, and the other participants in the 1992 conference in Paris, boldly declared the “death of scientism,” they marked the end of a whole historical development and celebrated the present, post-modern period in science.

The new science: causality and probability

In the beginning of the twenty-first century we are more ready to recognize humbly that science has its own limitations and cannot cure all the evils of our human condition. This altered perception of science has been fostered by the advent of the so-called new science, which developed during the third decade of the last century. Quantum Mechanics has revolutionized the way people think about the natural world. In the atomic and nuclear realm the deterministic model, advanced by Laplace in his System of the World, was no longer valid. Certainty had to be replaced by the notion of probability; the whole principle of causality had to be questioned and revised. For example, the notion of “orbit,” perfectly valid when describing the motion of the earth around the sun, became meaningless in the new theory, which was designed to describe the properties of a negative electron moving around a positive nucleus. A well-defined trajectory was replaced by a “probability cloud.”

As these examples indicate, our ability to grasp reality is limited. Waves and particles are different descriptions of the same reality, which we are not able to define in absolute terms, as was once claimed by the deterministic science of the nineteenth century. At this point we realize that we must give up the idea of grasping “the thing in itself.” All this does not mean that the old, deterministic science was wrong, but only that it was correct under certain approximations, which are not valid in the micro-world of atoms and nuclei.

The healthy effect of this great revolution, brought about by the advent of the new science and Quantum Mechanics, has been to shake the arrogance of those who believed that everything could be predicted, once the initial conditions of the system were known, and to introduce an element of chance. We might say, in different words, that there is a place for God in the new scheme of ideas.

Einstein’s unenthusiastic response to Quantum Mechanics shows that he clearly perceived the “place for God” at the very heart of things. In the early stage of development of the new physics, he wrote to Niels Bohr: “Quantum Mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal, but hardly brings us close to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”⁴

Einstein’s letters and essays are famous for their many references to God. Although he did not have a religious affiliation and shunned all forms of organized religion, Einstein the scientist had a firm belief in God. Forty years before the 1992 conference in Paris declared the “death of scientism,” Einstein had come to this same conclusion, as shown in a letter to his dear friend Solovine⁵:

“You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way… There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods, but also “bared the miracles.” Oddly enough, we must be satisfied to acknowledge the “miracle” without there being any legitimate way for us to approach it.”

As an example of the “new scientist,” Einstein rejects a science without faith, without belief in the “miracle” that remains “unapproachable” and “mysterious.” Perhaps the best description of Einstein’s attitude toward religion appears on the back of the dedication page in a recent biography: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,”⁶ as Einstein once wrote to explain his personal creed.

Given the death of scientism, the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, and the obvious connection between faith and science in the life and work of men like Einstein, it is now possible to write a revised history of western science based not on the split between religious belief and scientific research, but on their intimate connection. We can view science and religion as two approaches, different but complementary, to the same reality. In fact, there has never been a good reason for an opposition between science and religion; they are not incompatible in their views of the natural world.

Awe and excitement in science and religion

Many scientists, then, have been and are believers. The question then arises: what do science and religion have in common, so that realms previously thought to be mutually exclusive can now be seen as intimately linked? We may point to three elements common to both science and faith: the belief in things unseen, the awe and excitement of discovery, and the goal of service to others. First, the belief in things unseen. It is said of Einstein that he was a religious person… in the sense that he [had] no doubt of the significance of those super-personal goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. His was not a life of prayer or worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith […] that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong pursuit was to discover them. His realism and optimism are illuminated by his remark: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.”⁷

One aspect that links science and religion, and characterizes a scientist’s spirituality, is the feeling of excitement, the thrill that both scientists and believers experience when confronted with a new facet of the truth that lies beyond the boundary presently accepted as the ultimate limit of their knowledge. As John Polkinghorne, a British professor of theoretical particle physics at Cambridge University and now an Anglican priest, one of the speakers at the 1992 conference, observes, “Part of the authentic experience of a scientist is the feeling of astonishment he or she experiences when contemplating the remarkable rational beauty of the physical world, as it unfolds in his/her research.”⁸

The eminent physicist, Isidor Isaac Rabi (1989-1991), who was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1944, bears witness to the religious dimension of this experience of astonishment: “When I discovered physics, I realized it transcended religion. It was the higher truth. It filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me close to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, “Will it bring you nearer to God?” They always understood what I meant.”⁹

At the time, Rabi himself had no particular religious affiliation, except for his background, which was strongly rooted in Orthodox Judaism. According to his own testimony, his upbringing in a household where the holy books of the Bible were familiar readings, gave him a definite spiritual formation that affected his attitude toward science: “To choose physics in the first place requires a certain direction of interest. In my case it was something that goes to my background, and that is religious in origin. Not religion in a secular way, but religion as the inspirer of a way of looking at things. Choosing physics means, in some way, you’re not going to choose trivialities. The whole idea of God, that’s real class… real drama. When you’re doing good physics, you are wrestling with the Champ. You have one life to do it, you don’t want to waste it.”¹⁰

Like Rabi, who moved “nearer to God” through scientific research and discovery, Xavier Le Pichon, a speaker in the 1992 conference and a professor of oceanography and geophysics at the prestigious Collège de France, speaks of his amazing encounters with the God of nature. A member of the French National Academy of Sciences, he has been exploring the bottom of the oceans for the past thirty years. Those underwater explorations have, as he says, awakened his “capacity for adoration”: “I have often experienced this capacity for adoration during my scientific explorations. I think in particular of my first descent in a submarine in the Rift Valley, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at a depth of ten thousand feet… In our little boat, we are the first people to discover this scenery reminiscent of Genesis, the virgin crust, produced by the marriage between fire and earth. I had an appointment with the Earth so that I could make an offering to God.”¹¹

The same sentiments are expressed by another one of our speakers, Fr. George Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo and at the University of Arizona. I quote: “My scientific exploration and slow understanding of the universe is a prayer, and one that is drawing me into a deeper relationship with God. My understanding of the universe, with faith as a foundation of my life, is being drawn into the mystery of God. And this is why we’ll never fully understand our universe: while the scientific knowledge draws us on and on, the more we know, the less we know in many ways. The universe participates in the mystery of God.”¹²

Recently, in an article on the New York Times, the Dalai Lama, speaking about the convergence of science and spirituality, said, “Science could benefit from exploring issues usually left to the humanities. I believe that we must find a way to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. I am speaking of a secular ethics, which embraces compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers: they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.”

Those sentiments are echoed by Xavier Le Pichon, who said: “Science and technology are not only necessary, they are indeed the main tools needed to perfect the creation entrusted to humankind by God. To the extent we place the poor and the least ones at the center of our society, to the extent we ask them to inspire the civilization we are about to build, science and technology will appear as means offered in order to create a civilization of love.”¹³

So, perhaps, the “battle” between Science and Religious Faith is not so polarized as some of those at the extreme edges of the debate would have us to believe.

“In this modern era of cosmology, evolution, and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual world views?”¹⁴

Dr. Francis Collins, author of the best selling book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and Director of the National Genome Research Institute, responded with a resounding “Yes” to this question, in his public lecture on February 20, 2007, at Purdue University.14 To an enthusiastic crowd of more than 1,100 participants, Dr. Collins stated that “The newfound power to read our own instruction book is no obstacle to faith in the existence of God.” Dr. Collins called for a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit. “We need science if we are going to survive in a complicated world, and we need faith if we are going to keep ourselves in perspective. We must seek out the ways in which these world views can happily coexist, and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms, if we are really concerned about our own future in this world.” Everyone who questions how religious faith would be reconciled with scientific knowledge, and everyone interested in an open and sincere discussion of one of the most crucial issues of our time, will be greatly enlightened by Dr. Collins’ experience described in his book “The Language of God.”

Roberto Colella is a professor of physics at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Notes

1. Guitton, Jean, Grichka Bogdanov, and Igor Bogdanov. Dieu et la Science, Grasset. 1991.

2. Delumeau, Jean (edited by). Le Savant el La Foi, Champs-Flammarion, Paris 1989; p. 230 (translated from French by Roberto Colella).

3. Molt, Sir Nevill (edited by). Can Scientists Believe? James and James, London, 1991, p. 71.

4. Pais, Abraham. Niels Bohr’s Times, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 318.

5. Einstein, Albert. Letters to Solovine, New York Philosophical Library, 1987, p. 131.

6. Einstein, Albert. “Science, Philosophy and Religion: A Symposium.” 1941.

7. Pais, Abraham. Subtle is the Lord… The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Clarendon Press, Oxford, New York, 1982, p. vi.

8. Lecture on “Science and Religious Faith,” Purdue University, February 27, 1997.

9. Ridgen, John S.. Rabi, Scientist and Citizen, Basic Books Publishers, New York, 1987, p. 82.

10. See Ref. 8, p.p. 73-79.

11. See Ref. 2, p. 166.

12. Public Lecture at Purdue University, April 2, 1998.

13. See Delumeau 1989, p. 168.

14. Collins, Francis, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Free Press, New York, London, 2006.

The quantum description of the universe is very different than the classically observed one, or our perceptions in everyday life. This new way of looking at nature has many consequences, both philosophically and practically. The modern technological development of the second half of the last century may be a very good example of the consequences of the discovery of the quantum world. Now we have a bunch of gadgets from cellular phones to long-lasting batteries, from engineered drugs to space missions, from pocket size computers to nanotechnology, a wide range of end-products of the quantum world. Certainly, these will not be the only changes in our life; quantum sciences will eventually affect the way we look at life.

One of the most dramatic potential changes in thought may arise from the discovery of the quantum entanglement of particles. Quantum entanglement can be described as non-classical correlations of different parties. It is very different than the classical description and can be explained by using the following analogy. Imagine an author writes a book of one hundred pages which includes the most precious arts or explains very important facts about the universe depending on one’s point of view. To make it more interesting or more realistic, he distributes each page of the book to one of his servants and asks them to read and understand the rules written in the book. That is, each servant has access only to one page of the book. If we assume the information on the pages is classical, every servant has one hundredth of the total information written in the book and if we let them communicate with each other, they can in principle reconstruct the written information. However, the situation is very strange in the quantum world. If the information in the book is written using entanglement principle of the quantum world, then none of the servants has any definite idea about the partial information on his page. It is as if the pages are empty. All the information about the content of the book is written on correlations of the pages, not physically on each page. So, the servants can have no idea, if they only look at their pages.

Einstein vs. Bohr

To understand this strange feature of quantum entanglement we should review the historical development of the concept. One of the earliest objections came from Einstein, who was one of the developers of quantum theory. Although he explained the photoelectric effect by introducing the concept of quantization of light, he did not believe in some of its consequences. Mainly, he was not sure about the completeness of quantum theory because of its contradictions with common sense and the theory of relativity. The famous 1927 Solvey Con ference was a turning point for debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who was also one of the developers of quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretations of the theory.

Einstein tried to show this incompleteness by proposing different Gedanken (thought) experiments. Each of these questions was answered rigorously by Bohr. However, Einstein was never convinced by Bohr about the completeness of the theory. The last one of these Gedanken experiments was one related to our concept, quantum entanglement. It is called the EPR paradox and takes its name from the authors of the famous paper “Can a quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935.

Mainly, the paper was about faster-than-light communication between physically separated objects, two particles. If two particles are generated from a source affected by the existence of a conservation law, like the conservation of energy, or linear or angular momentum, the conserved property is carried by the particles independent of their separation. If the conserved quantity is observed by measuring one of the particles, the other particle arranges itself according to the result of this measurement independent of the distance between particles. According to Bohr, this arrangement happens instantaneously at the time of measurement, which conflicts with Einstein’s theory of special relativity that says nothing can travel faster than light. Apparently, the knowledge of the result of the first measurement is carried somehow to the second particle. Bohr’s reply is now called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He takes this property as a postulate of quantum mechanics by saying that the state of the particles includes all information about them. After this explanation Einstein never replied again.

If we look more closely at the proposed experiment, we can deduce that in reality information is not transferred faster than light because although the measurement result of the second particle is decided by the first measurement, this information is hidden for the second particle. The result of the second measurement makes sense only if the result of the first measurement reaches the second one. Otherwise, the second measurement can be described as a random outcome of possible results. Now it makes sense if we return to the book description. Here our book has only two pages. Each page is given to one servant. If they only look at their pages there is no information, which means that measurement results are random.

However, if the two servants work together and share their measurement results, then the initial information can be reconstructed.

Coins

Einstein’s point of view can be described in the following example. Imagine we have two coins with the usual heads and tails on different sides. Let us assume that there is a conservation law deduced from everyday experiments stating that if we flip these two coins we always have two opposite results; that is, if we get tails from the one that we measured, the other one is heads for sure and vice versa. In the real world, these coins can be identified as electrons, photons or atoms. Heads/tails corresponds to the spin components for electrons, polarization directions for photons or ground/excited states for atoms. Now, imagine these two coins are separated by a large distance.

Einstein says that as soon as separation occurs the result of flipping is decided but this result is hidden from us. One can measure or learn it by performing a measurement or looking at each coin. Moreover, looking at only one coin is enough to determine the measurement result of the other coin, since the results are correlated. Conjecturing that the side of the coin is determined at the time of measurement is against the causality principle of the theory of relativity which says that cause and effect cannot be simultaneous. However, I am of the opinion that reality is closer to what Bohr described. That is, the result of the measurement is decided at the measurement time not at the separation time. Before the measurement, each coin shows both heads and tails at the same time. The information, deduced at the point of measurement when one of the coins is measured, is transferred faster than light, in other words, at infinite speed.

The nature of each coin is also very strange before the measurement because it includes both sides at the same time with equal probabilities, but a classical coin has only one side at one time, either heads or tails. Here the classical coin means the flipped or measured coin. This property of the quantum world is called parallelism. As in the famous case of Schrödinger’s cat, sometimes two extreme situations can happen at the same time. Schrödinger’s cat is a very special cat which is dead and alive at the same time, like a quantum coin. However, when one measures such a cat, that is, observes the cat, its nature collapses to one of the known situations, either a dead cat or a live cat. This measuring process happens systematically due to interactions with its surroundings and is called decoherence.

Although the quantum world is very strange and different than the classical world, it encapsulates more reality than we experience in our everyday life. In the near future, we can expect that ways of looking at the world will be different than the present mechanical, deterministic, and materialistic view because of the unexpected outcomes of the quantum world. If you know how to look, you can already feel this change.

Modern theories of creation are built upon quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of gravity. The question is what happened before the Big Bang? Einstein’s equations break down at the enormously small distances and large energies found at the universe’s origin. At distances 10-33cm, quantum effects take over from Einstein’s theory. For questions involving the beginning of time, one must invoke the ten-dimensional theory. The Big Bang probably originated in the breakdown of the original ten-dimensional universe into a four- and six-dimensional universe. Therefore, the history of the Big Bang represents the breakup of previously unified symmetries, and the split universe was no longer symmetrical. Six dimensions have curled up.

Quantum physics abolishes time close to the Big Bang. How did the universe come into existence? Why does time vanish in the black hole? Did time exist before the universe came into being? These questions and realities point to the existence of a Creator.

Unfortunately, quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of gravity are mutually incompatible. In this new millennium, superstring theory, or simply string theory, resolves this tension. Three particle theorists (Yoichiro Nambu, Leonard Susskind, and Holger Nielsen) independently realized that the dual theories developed in 1968 to describe the particle spectrum also describe the quantum mechanics of an oscillating string. This marks the official birth of string theory in 1970, according to which the marriage of the laws of the large and the small is not only happy but also inevitable. Brian Greene writes in his The Elegant Universe: String theory has the inherent capability to show that all of the astonishing happenings in the universe”from the frenzied dance of subatomic quarks (components of protons or neutrons) to the stately dance of orbiting binary stars, from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic whirl of celestial galaxies”are reflections of one grand physical principle, one master equation.

Fundamental forces

During the past hundred years, physicists have proven the existence of four fundamental forces in nature: Gravitational force, electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force. Gravity, the most familiar force, keeps Earth revolving around the sun and our feet planted firmly on the ground. Electromagnetic force, the next most familiar force, is the driving force for such things as lights, TVs, computers, and telephones.

The strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces are less familiar, because they operate in the atom’s nucleus. The strong force (mediated by gluons) keeps quarks glued together inside protons and neutrons, and keeps protons and neutrons tightly crammed together inside atomic nuclei. The weak force (mediated by W and Z particles) determines the radioactive decay of such radioactive materials as uranium, plutonium, and tritium.

Gravitational force is mediated by graviton (the concept of graviton was introduced in 1974), photons for the electromagnetic force (a photon is the smallest EM force or the smallest packet of energy for light). In Einstein’s day, the strong and weak forces were unknown. For 30 years Einstein sought to unify the two distinct forces of gravity and electromagnetism.

String theory

Matter is composed of atoms, which in turn are made of nucleons (protons and neutrons in the nucleus) and electrons orbiting around the nucleus. Nucleons are made of three quarks each. Quarks are made of string. According to the standard model of particle physics, the universe’s elementary constituents are point-like ingredients with no internal structure. However, this standard model cannot be a complete theory, for it does not include gravity. But according to string theory, atomic and subatomic particles are not point-like; rather, they consist of tiny one-dimensional filaments somewhat like infinitely thin rubber bands. Physicists call these vibrating, oscillating, and dancing filaments strings.

String theory takes its name from this point of view. Unlike an ordinary piece of string, which itself is composed of molecules and atoms, the strings of string theory are alleged to lie deeply within the heart of matter. They are so small”on average about as long the Planck length (10-33 cm, or about 100 billion billion [1020] times smaller than an atomic nucleus)”that they appear point-like even when examined with our most powerful equipment. String theory offers a far fuller and more satisfying explanation than that of the standard model.

Moreover, this theory shows the harmonious union of general relativity and quantum mechanics”a major success. In this new millennium, the excitement in the physics community is that string theory may provide the unified theory of all four forces and all matter. For this reason, string theory sometimes is described as possibly being the theory of everything.

String theory proclaims that the observed particle properties (i.e., mass, charge, and spin) are reflections of a string’s various vibrations. Each preferred pattern of a string’s vibration in string theory appears as a particle whose mass and force charges are determined by the string’s oscillatory pattern. All fundamental particles can be described as resonant patterns of these string vibrations. There is even a mode describing the graviton. The same idea applies to the forces of nature as well. Hence everything, all matter and all forces, is unified under the microscopic string oscillations”the notes that strings can play.

Extra Dimensions

Our universe has three spatial dimensions: length, width, and height. In formulating the general theory of relativity, Einstein showed that time is another dimension. According to the general theory of relativity, space and time communicate the gravitational force through their curvature. The special theory of relativity is Einstein’s law of space and time in the absence of gravity.

In 1919, the mathematician Theodor Kaluza unified Maxwell’s electromagnetism and Einstein’s theory of general relativity by adding a fifth dimension. Thus Kaluza was the one who suggested that the universe might have more than three spatial dimensions.

For example, a garden hose viewed from a long distance looks like a one-dimensional object. When looked at closely, a second dimension, one shaped like a circle and curled around the hose, becomes visible. The direction along the hose’s length is long, extended, and easily visible. The direction circling around its thickness is short, curled up, and harder to see. Hence spatial dimensions are of two types: large, extended, and therefore directly evident, or small, curled up, and far harder to detect. As for the garden hose, the curled-up dimension encircling its thickness is detected either moving closer to the hose or using a pair of binoculars from a distance. If the hose is as thin as a hair or a capillary, its curled-up dimension is more difficult to detect.

In 1926, the mathematician Oskar Klein applied Kaluza’s theory to quantum theory, which is used in modern string theory. Klein showed that our universe’s spatial fabric may have both extended (the three spatial dimensions of daily experience) and curled-up dimensions. The universe’s additional dimensions are tightly curled up into a tiny space, a space so tiny that it has so far eluded detection. These extra dimensions are believed to be minuscule, somewhere between 10-35 meters and 0.3 millimeters in size.

The equations of string theory show that the universe has nine space dimensions and one time dimension. At present, no one knows why the three space and one time dimensions are large and extended, while all of the others are tiny and curled up.

Supersymmetry

Symmetry is a physical system property that does not change when the system is transformed. For example, a sphere is rotationally symmetrical, since its appearance does not change if it is rotated.

In 1971, supersymmetry was invented in two contexts at once: in ordinary particle field theory and as a consequence of introducing fermions into string theory. It holds the promise of resolving many problems in particle theory, but requires equal numbers of fermions and bosons. Thus, it cannot be an exact symmetry of Nature.

Supersymmetry, a mathematical transformation, is a symmetry principle that relates a particle’s properties of a whole number amount (integer) of spin (bosons) to those with half a whole (half-integer or odd) number amount of spin (fermions). Bosons tend to be the mediators of fundamental forces, while fermions make up the matter experiencing these forces. Bosons can occupy the same space and have an integral spin (0,1, .), while fermions cannot occupy the same space and have a half-integral spin ( 1/2, 3/2,.). Bosons transmit such forces as photons, gravitons, W and Z particles, mesons, and gluons. Many bosons can occupy the same state at the same time. Fermions (e.g., electrons, muons, tau, protons, neutrons, quarks, and neutrinos) cannot share a given state at a given time with other fermions. The fact that fermions make up matter explains why we cannot walk through walls: the inability of fermions (matter) to share the same space the way bosons (particles of force or energy) can.

Supersymmetry treats all particles of the same mass as different varieties of the same superparticle. This means that there is an equal matching between bosons and fermions. A supersymmetric string theory is called a superstring theory. The original string theory only described bosons, and hence became known as bosonic string theory (BST). Thus it did not describe fermions or, for example, include quarks and electrons.

Introducing supersymmetry to BST engendered a new theory that describes both the forces and the matter making up the universe: the theory of superstrings. String theorists have shown that all string theories are different aspects of a string theory that has not 10 but 11 spatial dimensions. This was called M-theory. The M might stand for the mother of all theories or mystery, magic, matrix, or membrane. The last two refer to mathematical techniques used in science. There is no space or time in M Theory. Furthermore, our space-time is not four-dimensional after all. M theory unites the four forces of nature (e.g., gravity, quantum mechanics, strong force, and weak force) and, remarkably, is a mathematical and geometrical theory. It is attractive because it can explain gravity and an atom’s inside at the same time and thus resolve the contradiction between current theories.

Summary and Conclusions

String theory gives a theoretical description of elementary particles and treats them as one-dimensional curves (strings). Traditional models of interactions between elementary particles are based on quantum field theory, which treats particles as dimensionless points. Theoretical physicists have not developed a workable theory of gravitation that is consistent with quantum mechanics’ principles.

However, treating elementary particles as strings permits the derivation of a quantum theory that encompasses all four forces. Superstring theory, a combination of string theory and supersymmetry, treats particles as very short (10-33 cm along its single dimension, which is 1020 smaller than a proton’s diameter) closed strings (string loops). All of the masses, charges, and other properties of elementary particles result from the vibration of these superstrings at different frequencies. The complex mathematical basis of superstrings involves 10 dimensions: 9 spatial dimensions, 6 of which are invisible, and time. Since superstring theory provides a unified description of all elementary particles and fundamental forces, it is sometimes called the theory of everything.

Some major unsolved problems of string theory are how to condense, 10 dimensions to 6 (spatial) plus 4 (space and time) dimensions, and what is happening at distances smaller than 10-33 cm. In addition, the experimental verification of the existence of strings in the near future poses quite a challenge. Since they are thought to be less than a billionth of a billionth the size of an atom, we cannot use current technology to detect them directly. An indirect test, however, will be carried out within the next decade or so by the Large Hadron Collider, a huge atom smasher being built by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva, Switzerland). There also is an urgent need to develop new mathematics in areas of Riemann surfaces, algebraic geometry, singular geometries, number theory, and other related fields. 

Footnotes

1. K stands for Kelvin, a measurement of degree relating to, conforming to, or having a thermometric scale on which the unit of measurement equals the centigrade degree and according to which absolute zero is 0A , the equivalent of “273.16A C.

References

• Adams, Steve. A Theory of Everything. New Scientist 161 (20 Feb. 1999).
• Arkani-Hamed, Nima et al. The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions. Scientific American 283 (Aug. 2000): 62-69.
• Davies, P. C. W. and Julian Brown, Eds. Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Duff, Michael J. The Theory Formerly Known as Strings. Scientific American 278, (Feb. 1998): 64-69.
• Green, Michael M., John H. Schwarz, and Edward Witten. Superstring Theory. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
• Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
• Gribbin, John R. The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything. Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1998.
• Kaku, Michio. Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Mukhi, Sunil. The Theory of Strings: An Introduction. Current Science 77 (25 Dec. 1999): 1624-34.
• Peat, David F. Superstring and the Search for the Theory of Everything. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.
• Polchinski, Joseph G. String Theory. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

These words attempt to pierce the veil of habit that develops in our minds from not looking into the reason for things. The perfection of the order operative in the universe is of such a degree that it prevents us from being aware of it. In the same way, we only become aware of the faultless operation of the watches we have worn on our wrists for years when they stop working.

In the world-view developed upon the foundation of Newton’s laws of motion, the universe was likened to a flawlessly operating watch. Events were tied to one another in a cause-effect relationship and our knowing the laws of this relationship allowed us to predict events with great accuracy. It was possible to determine with mathematical exactness a wide range of phenomena, from the times of eclipses of sun and moon to the amount of fuel and the speed needed to put an object into orbit around the earth. The success of these ‘natural laws’ led many people to believe that they completely expressed and ‘ruled’ the whole order of the universe.

Because God creates and sustains all things and events from behind the veil of universal general laws, because certain events (causes) are followed reliably by similar events (effects) each time they (the causes) occur, it begins to be supposed that the causes are responsible for or ‘create’ the effects. This is, of course, a gross error, as no number of causes suffices to create even a little effect; for every event even the tiniest, the whole universe must be presupposed first, including the laws operative within it. Moment by moment, all things and all events are created and sustained by God, Who wills from an infinite range of alternative possibilities a particular actuality.

The clockwork model of the universe derived from Newtonian or classical physics is not a complete account of the phenomena which we observe in the universe. Already in the late 19th century, scientists had been bewildered by the lines that turned up in the light spectra emitted by heated gases: the steady, stable clockwork model predicted did not happen. Also, there were problems explaining the behaviour of light: sometimes it made more sense as a beam of particles, sometimes as a wave.

Today our understanding of the universe is very far from the ‘clockwork’ model. The shift in understanding occurred in the first quarter of the 20th century, beginning in 1900 with the publication of Max Planck’s work on radiation. The problem Planck worked on for six years was that the actually measured radiation from hot bodies did not conform to the values predicted by the classical theory. He put forward the suggestion that bodies radiating energy did so, not evenly and continuously, but unevenly and discontinuously in tiny packets or ‘quanta’. So startling was this suggestion that, despite confirmation by experiment, Planck himself thought of his theory as solving the problem of radiation by a sort of trick.

But then, in 1905, Albert Einstein published an article using the notion of packets of energy of definite sizes to explain how electrons are ejected from metal when light (radiation) falls on it. Whereas classical theory had predicted that the voltage (measure of the energy of the electrons ejected) would be proportional to the intensity of the light (radiation), Einstein showed that it was proportional instead to the frequency of the radiation. The conformity of this explanation with experimentally observed results gained Einstein the Nobel Prize. (Einstein didn’t receive the prize for his famous theory of relativity.) The significance of these findings and theories was not fully appreciated at the time.

A few years later in 1910, Ernest Rutherford did a ground-breaking experiment. He bombarded a thin layer made up of gold atoms with high energy particles and showed that the atom contained an extremely small positively-charged nucleus with negatively-charged electrons moving around it. Following the classical physics model, these electrons should have been small particles orbiting the nucleus in the same way as the planets orbit the sun, steadily losing energy until they fell on to the nucleus-in other words, the atom should have been unstable. Again it was a rejection of the classical model, three years later, by Niels Bohr, that helped solve the problem. Bohr argued that the electrons must move in fixed orbits until deflected by the absorption or emission of a unit of energy.

Atoms emit radiation after various external signals and only at specific wave lengths. As Einstein said, every different color of light is composed of energy packets inversely proportional to its wave-length (frequency). Because the Planck constant (h) is very small, the energy of these packets is also very, very small. For example, a normal light bulb emits 1020 light packets (photons) a second. Each of these photons is created when an activated atom or molecule passes to its normal or ‘basic state.’ Thus light, which allows us to see and which is a basic building block of life, develops as a result of the motions (in wave form) of electrons. The concepts of classical physics could successfully explain many of the events of daily life, but it couldn’t explain events on the subatomic level.

During those years (1910-1925) physics fell into a state of

confusion because of the many measurements that conflicted with general theory and could not be explained by it. This situation was to lead W. Pauli (later to discover the principle fundamental to the understanding of the structure and characteristics of elements) to say he would rather have been a singer or gambler than a physicist. Actually in order to explain the observations being made, the whole way in which physical events had been understood required fundamental revision by wholly new methods. This was achieved by Werner Heisenberg, a 24 year-old physicist described by his teachers as a person who dealt with the essence of a subject rather than getting bogged down in detail, a person with powerful concentration and ambition. Perhaps the success of this young mind can be explained by the critical perspective he developed through reading the works of great men such as Kant and Plato, which was later supported with sound knowledge he got from great physicists. Heisenberg, who relaxed from work by climbing rocks and reading poetry, said: ‘It was around three in the morning when the calculations were completed and the solution to the problem appeared in front of me. First I experienced a great shock. I was so excited that I didn’t even think about sleeping. I left the house and, sitting on a rock, I waited for the sunrise.’

Like the other scientists who established quantum physics, Heisenberg was a philosopher-physicist. The philosophy he accepted and advocated that allowed him to interpret atomic events is as follows: ‘Even though it is successful with classical physics, the language we use to explain physical events in the atom or its surroundings is insufficient. For this reason, after making a specific measurement in a quantum system (for example, an atom), using that knowledge we can get a theory that will tell us what kind of results we can find in the next measurement. But it’s not possible to say anything about what takes place between the two measurements.’

What pushed Heisenberg to make such a statement was that the mathematical tools he used to develop a theory that could explain the observed discontinuity of energy in light and atoms were abstract concepts that had not been used before. In classical physics the numbers we know were used to give value to matter’s position, speed, size, etc. In Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, these sizes were expressed with infinite dimensional n x n matrices which enabled physicists to calculate the properties attributed to electrons (energy, position, momentum, angular momentum) in an approximate way. Because these abstract mathematical expressions didn’t have an equivalent in everyday spoken language, it wasn’t possible to approach them with a classical understanding. It was observed that in order to measure the position of an electron, the experimenter necessarily altered its velocity. This problem was formally expressed in 1927 in Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle.

Independently of Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger made another significant breakthrough in mathematical description of electrons. Inspired by the hypothesis put forward two years earlier by De Broglie about the wave properties of matter particles, Schrodinger developed a ‘wave mechanics’ by which the movement of particles could be calculated. (figure: 1) But the fundamental question remained as to what these strange and original ‘waves of matter particles’ or ‘waves accompanying matter particles’ were.

The mathematical formulations devised by Heisenberg and Schrodinger are complementary in the sense that physicists use whichever best resolves the particular calculations they are trying to make. There is no formally distinct space between the scientists and the phenomena they are seeking to understand and manipulate: their means of observation and manipulation (the mathematics) in some sense ‘posit’, put in place, the very phenomena whose place (among other properties) they are trying to determine. Alongside the notion of an infinite array of rows and points, as invented by Heisenberg, to plot the position or motion of a sub-atomic particle, physicists and philosophers of physics have begun to speak of arrays of events or ‘stories’ to try to explain, in something resembling ordinary language, the ideas they are handling. This cannot be described as a world-view in the way that the Newtonian physics confirmed and sustained a world-view, but it is nevertheless a clear and distinct disposition which, instead of excluding God as the Force Who wound up the clockwork and then retired from His creation, admits the in-completeness and uncertainty of human knowledge as a structural element of reality-in other words, the uncertainty is not a function of our present ignorance (to be relieved by future knowledge), but an actual constituent of the way reality is.

Quantum physics, at least figuratively and metaphorically, has became a vehicle for the interpretation of such concepts as matter, beyond-matter, energy, existence and non-existence in a way nearer to Divine sources; and led to many physicists settling accounts with their conscience and turning towards God Who is understood to be simultaneously transcendent and immanent, there and here.