Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into before. The theory had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been proposed speculatively long before there was either the math or the experimental ability to properly investigate it. The theory described the smallest particles of spacetime not as geometrical points but as ultramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions, six of which were compactified around the loops, making them somewhat exotic mathematical objects. The space they vibrated in had been quantized by twenty-first-century theorists, into loop patterns called spin networks, in which lines of force in the finest grain of the gravitational field acted somewhat like the lines of magnetic force around a magnet, allowing the strings to vibrate only in certain harmonics. These supersymmetrical strings, vibrating harmonically in ten-dimensional spin networks, accounted very elegantly and plausibly for the various forces and particles as perceived at the subatomic level, all the bosons and fermions, and their gravitational effects as well. The fully elaborated theory therefore claimed to mesh successfully quantum mechanics with gravity, which had been the problem in physical theory for over two centuries.