String Theory: Physics or Metaphysics?
Gabriele Veneziano*
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
I will give arguments for why the enormous progress made during the last
century on understanding elementary particles and their fundamental
interactions suggests strings as the truly elementary constituents of Nature. I
will then address the issue of whether the string paradigm can in principle be
falsified or whether it should be considered as mere metaphysics.
1. THE CENTURY OF PHYSICS?
Very likely the 20th century will go down in history as the century of physics.
In my opinion no other field of human knowledge has undergone, in that
century, so much progress and so many revolutionary changes. Its very
beginning was marked by three developments that shook forever as many
scientific beliefs:
The belief in absolute determinism when, in 1900, Max Planck, in order
to eliminate an infinity in the energy emitted by a black body,
introduced a constant, h, that still carries his name. This marked the
beginning of the quantum revolution whose indeterminism was nicely
embodied later in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,
(1)
that bounds from below the product of position and momentum
uncertainties.
The belief in absolute time when, in 1905, Albert Einstein, starting
from the invariance of the speed of light in vacuum, c, introduced
Special Relativity and his much celebrated relation between mass and
energy:
* Collège de France, Paris; Theory Division – CERN, Geneva
14 Humana.Mente – Issue 13 – April 2010
(2)
The belief in an absolute geometry when, only ten years later, again
Einstein formulated the theory of General Relativity according to which
matter “curves” spacetime and bodies simply move along geodesics
(i.e., minimal-length paths) in the ensuing non-trivial geometry. In
General Relativity Newton’s constant, G, controls the amount by which
mass and energy affects the surrounding geometry of spacetime.
These three breakthroughs fed all subsequent developments of that branch
of 20th century physics that aims at uncovering the laws of physics at their
deepest level. In particular, the efforts made in the twenties and thirties to
combine Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity led physicists to
formulate, in the forties, a very successful framework known as Quantum Field
Theory (QFT). The first successful application of QFT was Quantum
Electrodynamics (QED for short), a theory describing electromagnetic
phenomena at the quantum level with incredible accuracy (better than 10 parts
in a billion in the case of the anomalous magnetic moments of the electron and
the muon).
During the fifties and the sixties physicists tried to extend that framework
to the description of two of the other known forces, the strong (or nuclear)
force, responsible for binding protons and neutrons inside the atomic nuclei,
and the weak force, responsible for radioactivity. Such experimental and
theoretical effort was rewarded in the early seventies when physicists
formulated the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles, a milestone
that will certainly stay in the books of physics. Many tests of the Standard
Model, carried out in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, have so far
confirmed the validity of the Standard Model with no exception (the discovery
that neutrinos do have mass can be easily incorporated in the Standard Model
without any basic change on its structure).
Rather than describing what the Standard Model is, I will simply emphasize
its beauty in terms of the conceptual unification it brings about. The Standard
Model asserts that all non-gravitational interactions are described by one and
the same special class of QFTs, known as gauge theories. This was a known
fact for the QED description of electromagnetic interactions, but is a highly
non trivial – and even surprising – claim for the other two forces. The reason
why the same kind of theory, a gauge theory, can lead to such diverse
phenomena like Coulomb’s law, the short range force responsible for nuclear
Paper – String Theory: Physics or Metaphysics? 15
binding, and the slow process of radioactive decay, is due to the fact that the
underlying symmetry of a gauge theory (called gauge invariance) can be
realized in different ways, or phases, not unlike the way water can manifest
itself as a solid, a liquid, or a gas.
What is this single gauge principle underlying so many diverse
phenomena? The answer is quite simple: all these interactions are induced, at
the most fundamental level, by massless spin-1 particles.1 Gauge theories are
the mathematical way to describe such kind of elementary particles. Thus, if we
wish to extract a single message from the incredible success of the Standard
Model, I would put it as follows:
Nature likes spin-1 massless particles
and therefore She likes Gauge Theories.
But then what about the fourth fundamental force known to us, gravity? For
several decades particle theorists were not very interested in gravity, since
gravitational forces are completely negligible for elementary particles in
normal situations (in the hydrogen atom, for instance, the ratio of the
gravitational and electromagnetic force between the electron and the proton is
a miserable ). Actually, physicists were quite happy to leave gravity to
Einstein’s General Relativity. Also, since gravity is relevant only for
macroscopic bodies, they were happy to treat it “classically”, i.e., without any
appeal to quantum mechanics. However, when looked at more carefully, also
gravity reveals itself as a sort of gauge theory where the “gauge” symmetry is
replaced by Einstein’s equivalence principle, an invariance under a generic
change of the coordinate system. Even more amazingly, one finds that the
symmetries of General Relativity are what they are precisely because the
quantum of gravity (called graviton in analogy with the electromagnetic
photon) is a massless particle of spin 2 (angular momentum 2 ). In other
words, we can add gravity to our previous reasoning by slightly enlarging the
message that Nature is sending to us:
Nature likes spin-1 and spin-2 massless particles
and therefore She likes Gauge Theories and General Relativity.
1
Spin-1 means an angular momentum . We recall that Quantum Mechanics implies
that angular momentum is an integer or half-integer multiple of .
16 Humana.Mente – Issue 13 – April 2010
What remains to be explained is why Nature likes precisely such kind of
massless particles.
2. CLASSICAL vs QUANTUM STRINGS
I will now argue that Relativistic Quantum String Theory (RQST) explains in a
very natural way the existence of those massless spinning particles that Nature
appears to like so much. What is RQST? It is simply what one obtains by
adding to the basic principles of Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
(whose combination, as I said, led to QFT) a third crucial ingredient: the
assumption that all truly elementary particles, rather than being pointlike, are
instead one-dimensional objects: strings.
By combining this assumption with special relativity and quantum
mechanics results in arguably the richest theory ever constructed by physicists,
RQST. The three ingredients: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Strings, of
RQST are all essential, but I will concentrate my discussion on the latter two,
Quantum Mechanics and Strings. I will argue that Quantum Mechanics is
essential to make string theory a candidate theory of elementary particles and
fundamental interactions by comparing the properties of classical,
deterministic strings with those of their quantum mechanical analogues.
A classical relativistic string is a well defined system containing a single
physical parameter, the so-called string tension T. The string tension plays, in
string theory, the same role that mass plays in point-particle theory. Mass can
be converted into energy via Einstein’s eq. (2), whereas T denotes the energy
per unit length stored in the string. Its physical dimensions are thus
. A classical non-interacting pointlike particle moves along a
trajectory that minimizes its length (the already mentioned geodesic); similarly,
the classical string motion is such as to minimize the area of the two-
dimensional surface it sweeps during its motion.
Classically, neither point-particle nor string theory have a fundamental
length built in. At the quantum level, however, we can associate to the mass of a
particle a quantum length (so-called Compton wavelength) given by:
. Of course, such a wavelength is not a universal constant since it
varies from particle to particle according to its mass. Similarly, we can associate
with T a quantum length-scale, called the string length:
Paper – String Theory: Physics or Metaphysics? 17
(3)
except that there is just a single T for all possible strings and therefore
unlike , is a truly universal length scale. We can say that the three
fundamental constants c, h and represent, respectively, the three basic
ingredients underlying RQST: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Strings.
Here comes the punch line: classically, string theory is scale-free. Given a
possible classical string motion we can always construct another one by
rescaling all lengths by a common factor. As a consequence, the mass of the
string gets rescaled by exactly the same factor. We can go to the limit in which
we rescale the size of the string to zero size and the string will become both
massless and spinless. The last property is physically very obvious: classically
we cannot have angular momentum without having both a finite mass and a
finite size (and indeed under a rescaling of the string size by a factor k its
angular momentum gets rescaled by a factor k2). Actually, one can prove a
strict inequality stating that , which immediately implies that massless
spinning strings cannot exist classically!
Let us now turn on h, i.e., Quantum Mechanics. Its consequences are truly
amazing, even miraculous. They can be partly understood by the quantum
mechanics of known systems. Take for instance the hydrogen atom: the
classical theory had great problems in explaining its stability. The single
electron of the hydrogen atom would like to emit electromagnetic radiation
(like a charged particle circulating in an accelerator at CERN), would lose
energy and slow down, and eventually “fall” on the nucleus (a proton in this
case). But the uncertainty principle of Quantum Mechanics, Eq.(1), intervenes
and tells us that falling on the nucleus would make the relative position of the
electron and the proton very precisely determined at the cost of a lot of
momentum uncertainty, hence of a large kinetic energy. Quantum Mechanics
tells us which the best compromise is: the optimal (i.e., energy minimizing)
average distance between the electron and the proton is given by the so-called
Bohr radius:
(4)
where 1/137 is the so-called fine-structure constant.
A similar mechanism is at work with a quantum string. In analogy with a
classical string it does not like to have a large size (since this costs a lot of
18 Humana.Mente – Issue 13 – April 2010
tension energy) but, unlike a classical string, it does not like to be very small
either since, in that case, its very small forces a very large i.e., a very
large kinetic energy (again the uncertainty principle at work!). Not
surprisingly, the best compromise happens to be for a quantum string to have a
size of order , the only length scale available. Thus quantum strings acquire,
through Quantum Mechanics, a characteristic size, a minimal length. That
minimal length is essential for resolving the long-standing short-distance
problems with quantization of Einstein’s General Relativity.
A second, no less important, miracle comes from the fact that the classical
inequality suffers a quantum correction which is insignificant for
large J and M but essential when these are small. The inequality becomes:
(5)
where a can take integer or half integer values up to and including .
Thus, as a quantum effect, massless strings of spin 1 and 2 become not only
possible but, actually, inevitable in RQST!
In conclusion, the combination of the two above-mentioned miracles
potentially makes RQST a realistic theory of all fundamental interactions
which, furthermore, is free from the UV infinities that plague ordinary QFTs
and that make quantization of General Relativity virtually impossible.
3. IS THIS PHYSICS?
Physicists have a definite criterion for deciding whether a certain theory can be
considered to be a scientific one: the theory has to make testable predictions so
that it can be falsified, at least in principle, by experiments. (On the contrary, a
theory can never be proven to be correct, since it is impossible to exclude that
an alternative explanation of the same phenomena can be found.) When this
criterion is applied to string theory it is converted into something slightly more
demanding. Indeed, everybody would agree that string theory makes definite
predictions, like for instance the existence of very heavy (by particle physics
standards) “string excitations”, or modifications of gravity at very short
distances. What is under dispute is whether any conceivable experiment, now
or in the foreseable future, will ever be able to test those predictions.
Paper – String Theory: Physics or Metaphysics? 19
Several respectable physicists have taken a negative attitude towards that
question. According to them RQST is a beautiful construction whose
predictions will never be accessible to experimental verification: hence RQST
is “not even wrong” to quote a sentence by famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
The reason underlying this statement is simply that the fundamental length of
RQST, , is, most likely, of the same order of magnitude (or perhaps just a
factor 10 larger than) the so-called Planck length, a length scale that can be
constructed out of the three fundamental constants we introduced at the very
beginning, c, , and G :
(6)
But then, it is argued, such a length scale is so tiny that there will never be a
way to distinguish a string of that size from a zero-size point. Hence, it will be
impossible to compare the predictions of a RQST from those of some suitable
QFT if we only have experiments of limited energy and thus, by the uncertainty
principle, of limited spatial resolution. Indeed, the possibility of building an
accelerator capable of testing distances such as those in eq. (6) is definitely out
of question.
That reasoning appears to be awed on (at least) two grounds:
There is in Nature a very powerful accelerator: the Universe itself.
Because of its expansion, the Universe has been cooling down since the
big bang. On the contrary, if we go back in time, the Universe was hotter
and hotter as we proceed towards the big bang. Thus, the physics of the
very early Universe, and even the very existence of a Big Bang as the
beginning of time, should have been strongly affected by the
characteristic properties of quantum strings and would much differ from
what would come out of more conventional theories like General
Relativity.
It is generally accepted today that the quantum properties of the early
Universe left an imprint on the large scale structures of the Universe
that we observe today: stars, galaxies, clusters. Therefore, it is all but
excluded that RQST can be tested through its cosmological
implications. Any possible modification of physics at the string scale has
been stretched to macroscopic (or even astronomical) distances by the
expansion of the Universe. At present, the problem with such a way of
testing string theory is that it is very hard to solve it in extreme regimes
20 Humana.Mente – Issue 13 – April 2010
like the one that must have prevailed around the big bang epoch.
Techniques are being developed to study such regimes, but are not yet
at the level of providing robust predictions.
There is an even stronger argument against the claim that RQST cannot
be falsified. It is enough to recall how the first version of string theory
was abandoned at the beginning of the seventies. That original string
theory, born in the late sixties and thus predating the construction of
the Standard Model, was not invented for the purposes for which it is
studied now: it was instead an attempt to describe the physics of the
strong interactions outside the framework of conventional QFT (at that
time QFT looked inapplicable to strong interactions). At the beginning
string theory led to great hopes, but then it proved to be too tight and
constrained a framework and, in particular, it kept predicting the
existence of massless particles of spin up to 2. When the purpose of
string theory was to describe the world of protons, neutrons and pions,
there was no room for such massless particles. This was certainly one of
the main reason for abandoning the old string theory in the early
seventies in favour of the theory of quarks and gluons, now known as
Quantum-ChromoDynamics (or QCD in analogy with QED).When the
purpose of string theory was not to describe the carriers of gauge and
gravitational interactions but rather the world of protons, neutrons and
pions, there was no place for such massless particles. This was certainly
one of the main reasons for abandoning the old string theory in the early
seventies in favour of the theory of quarks and gluons, now known as
Quantum-ChromoDynamics (or QCD in analogy with QED).
Could history repeat itself? Well, hopefully not, but nothing is less clear at the
moment. At a first, crude level of approximation RQST provides not only the
nice massless spinning particles we like and need so much: it also gives us, in a
single package, a bunch of massless spinless particles generically called
“moduli”. Some of them are related to the sizes and shapes of the extra
dimensions of space in which quantum strings like to evolve. This is, by the
way, another “gift” of quantum mechanics, we cannot just take what we like
and refuse the rest: string theory comes as a package deal: take it all or leave it
all!
One can show that these undesired massless strings produce new
unobserved long-range forces whose strength is similar to that of gravity but
Paper – String Theory: Physics or Metaphysics? 21
which, unlike gravity, do not obey the equivalence principle of General
Relativity and thus lead, for instance, to unacceptable violations of the
universality of free fall, a property now tested with exceedingly high precision.
Hopefully, that first approximation is indeed too crude and the moduli become
massive particles by the time the theory’s full solution is worked out. This will
make the new forces short-ranged and thus avoid contradiction with
experiments.
So, not only string theory is falsifiable, the real question is: why is it not
already falsified? The answer, once more, is that the theory is not developed
enough to be able to answer such questions since they lie outside the regimes
in which string theory can be studied by presently available techniques. We
should not forget, in this respect, that RQST is an entirely new and relatively
young theoretical construction. It took many decades to develop QFT to such
an extent that it could be successfully applied to actual experiments, or even to
understand that the non-observation of free quarks was not in contradiction
with QCD. Indeed, the problem of proving quark confinement turned out to be
extremely hard to solve analytically and, even today, can only be addressed
numerically through powerful dedicated computers.
The conclusion stemming from both arguments given above is that RQST is
so constrained by its mathematical and physical consistency that, in principle,
its test should be easy. Only our present inability to draw firm predictions from
its complicated equations is preventing us from saying today whether it has any
chance to survive. It is not an improvement in experimental techniques, but
rather of the theory itself, that will tell us whether this beautiful theory has any
chance to survive as a physical theory, or whether it will remain forever a
beautiful construction in search of experimental confirmation.
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