clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

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