Math, physics experts team up at Snowbird meet on 'string theory'

SNOWBIRD RESORT — Mathematicians and physicists seem to live in separate realms, one group working with numbers and the other studying the physical world. But in the peculiar case of string theory, their fields converge.

They also converged last week at Snowbird, when researchers in both areas attended the Conference on String Geometry. Coming from across the United States and several foreign countries, they listened as speakers such as Philip Candelas spoke on "Arithmetic of Calabi-Yau manifolds" and others covered topics equally arcane.

Candelas epitomized the dual approach of the conference. He is a mathematics professor at the University of Oxford, England, but formerly was on the physics faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. Altogether, 45 academics from across the United States and several foreign countries attended the five-day meeting.

Focus of the sessions was string theory, a proposition that paints a picture of the universe far stranger than our senses can detect.

According to this idea, there are nine spacial dimensions, rather than the three we know, plus the dimension of time. The basic units are unbelievably tiny "strings" that vibrate, and the vibrations determine what kind of particle is represented by each string.

String theory is a hot research topic because it promises to reconcile truths uncovered by Albert Einstein with the known bizarre effects of quantum mechanics. Many of its underpinnings were derived from math constructs attempting to tie together these aspects of physics.

If proven true, string theory could be the much-sought "theory of everything." It is such a popular subject that theorists have come up with a plethora of modifications. Nobody knows which is the correct one or even whether string theory itself is real. But many aspects of math and physics do hint that it's true.

During the session Wednesday, Andrew Strominger. a leader in the field and a Harvard University physics professor, was asked to comment on skeptics who say there's nothing to string theory.

"I hope they're wrong, but I can't prove it," he said. "And I bet my life work on their being wrong."

Strominger was one of the developers of an interpretation of string theory holding that extra dimensions are extremely small, about as tiny as the strings themselves. Humans can't see them because they are too minute for microscopes.

"But about four or five years ago, there was a proposal made that in fact we can't rule out, based on current experimental data, that there are large extra dimensions," he said. (By large, he meant as big as 0.01 mm.)

"I think it was a big shock to all of us, myself included, that such things could not be ruled out experimentally."