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DEGREES OF FREEDOM 15<br />
with other mysterious particles that exist only in all ten dimensions, such as the<br />
hypothetical graviton, which conveys the force of gravity. Think of the universe<br />
as the music of a hyperdimensional orchestra. And we may never know if<br />
there is a hyperBeethoven guiding the cosmic harmonies.<br />
Whenever I read about string theory, I can't help thinking about the Kabala<br />
in Jewish mysticism. Kabala became popular in the twelfth and following centuries.<br />
Kabalists believe that much of the Old Testament is in code, and this is<br />
why scripture may seem muddled. The earliest known Jewish text on magic<br />
and mathematics, Sefer Yetzira (Book of Creation), appeared around the fourth<br />
century A.D. It explained creation as a process involving ten divine numbers or<br />
sephiroth. Kabala is based on a complicated number mysticism whereby the<br />
primordial One divides itself into ten sephiroth that are mysteriously connected<br />
with each other and work together. Twenty-two letters of the Hebrew<br />
alphabet are bridges between them (Fig. 1.4).<br />
The sephiroth are ten hypostatized attributes or emanations allowing the<br />
infinite to meet the finite. ("Hypostatize" means to make into or treat as a substance—to<br />
make an abstract thing a material thing.) According to Kabalists, by<br />
studying the ten sephiroth and their interconnections, one can develop the<br />
entire divine cosmic structure.<br />
Similarly, physical reality may be the hypostatization of these mathematical<br />
constructs called "strings." As I mentioned, strings, the basic building blocks of<br />
nature, are not tiny particles but unimaginably small loops and snippets loosely<br />
resembling strings—except that strings exist in a strange, 10-D universe. The<br />
current version of the theory took shape in the late 1960s. Using hyperspace<br />
theory, "matter" is viewed as vibrations that ripple through space and time.<br />
From this follows the idea that everything we see, from people to planets, is<br />
nothing but vibrations in hyperspace.<br />
In the last few years, theoretical physicists have been using strings to explain<br />
all the forces of nature—from atomic to gravitational. Although string theory<br />
describes elementary particles as vibrational modes of infinitesimal strings that<br />
exist in ten dimensions, many of you may be wondering how such things exist<br />
in our 3-D universe with an additional dimension of time. String theorists<br />
claim that six of the ten dimensions are "compactified"—tightly curled up (in<br />
structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces) so that the extra dimensions are essentially<br />
invisible. 4<br />
As technically advanced as superstring theory sounds, superstring theory<br />
could have been developed a long time ago according to string-theory guru<br />
Edward Witten, 5 a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in