The Universe According to Brian Greene:
Eleven Dimensions and Everything Else In Between

  2 November 2004 

The universe has been lying to us this entire time. Everything we think we know about the fabric of space and time is an illusion. The certainty of its three dimensions, the straightness of its space, the steadiness of its ticking time—it’s all a sad myth of the senses. According to string theory—physics’ latest incarnation—we are a hologram, a mere collection of quantum probabilities. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that physics, in its search for a grand theory, is revealing the Truth—yes, the one with a capital T. Soon, we will understand. At least this is what Brian Greene keeps telling me. We’re sitting on a crowded subway train, it smells like rush hour, and he’s explaining why “the quest for the essence of truth—what reality is when you peel away all the layers—requires that we believe in 11 dimensions. It’s just in the equations. We can’t help but believe that everything we know is wrong.” 

I think he’s going to say something else—maybe about how our reality, the one with only three dimensions, is real too, or how this new physics only makes sense for really small particles or really smart people; or maybe he’s going to say something about time. I think I would like time to be real. Time feels real. But then the subway doors open. I follow Brian out into the busy street. 

When I met Brian that afternoon, he’d just finished being photographed for several hours (see cover). He looked coifed, telegenic, and had the slightly dazed eyes of someone who’d had to endure innumerable camera flashes. He was wearing a button-down shirt tucked neatly into well-fitting jeans. He seemed younger than I imagined. By title, Brian is a physics professor and codirector of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticles at Columbia University. But after his television special airs this fall, he will probably be the most recognized living scientist in the world. He is already the author of a best-selling book, The Elegant Universe, and has another book, titled Fabric of the Cosmos: Spacetime and the Texture of Reality, due out in February. The week before we met, he’d finished his new book. The week before that, he’d finished the television show. The next day, he was due to leave for Santa Barbara to attend a semester-long workshop on the cosmological implications of string theory. So this was a bad time for an interview. Brian needed to finish packing. I’m sure the last thing he wanted to do was explain yet again how the universe works to someone who knows none of its equations, or how he finds the time to make TV shows, write books, and practice science. But before Brian could disappear, he had to give one last interview. To me. So he waved off his publicists, said goodbye to the photographer, and took a final look in the mirror before we headed out the door. 

On the surface, Brian would seem to be a bundle of contradictions—cosmic philosophy does not normally jive with television, or good looks with a love of math. But he makes trespassing on seemingly separate cultures—alluding to Newton and Brahms in the same sentence—appear disconcertingly easy. Talking to him, one is rarely aware that his metaphors are not actually science; that he’s intimately familiar with a universe far different from ours. His translations feel sincere, yet they are still mere renderings of a more elegant view. Brian sees the world through a two-way mirror. There is this side, crammed with interviews, makeup, and traffic, and then there’s the place beyond, the nirvana of integers, starlight, and cosmic constants. Brian is our lonely translator, the corpus callosum connecting our divergent hemispheres. He is the very visible face we see. But Brian wants physics to be the sole star. It’s not too far into our conversation that I realize something about my interview subject: Brian is tired of talking about Brian. He has been asked the same banal questions by too many reporters. He’s had his hair styled too many times, gelled into that casual wave. He has had to wear makeup. He has had to smile when he doesn’t want to. He’s had to be away from his science. Brian stands on the curb and tries to hail a taxi. He confesses that he can’t wait to get back to his physics, to dissolve himself once again in questions that “just seem genuine.” The yellow Chevys pass us in droves. “It feels like these problems concerning space and time and how the universe began are really real,” he says, “not just problems of a human making. I mean, these are the big questions. You can’t get any bigger.” Soon Brian will be free to retreat to the inner provinces of math; to sit by the Pacific contemplating grains of sand. That’s where he wants to be. Salvation is just around the corner; but right now he’s with me in lower Manhattan, getting annoyed with the cabs. He gives up and suggests the subway. We descend underground and head uptown. 

Brian’s apartment is on the top floor of a Columbia faculty building. There’s no air conditioning, and it’s hot. The space is virtually empty, bare but for a ficus, a couple of chairs with a view of New Jersey, and a refrigerator with three bottles of water. The walls are naked and the space is disconcertingly quiet, completely devoid of the low hum of idling machines. The only sound is the distant impatience of commuters, honking at themselves. Brian opens the window, but the air is too humid to move. I sit in what feels like a broken chair. Brian apologizes for only having water and sits in the chair beside me. 

I begin with the standard biographical questions, naïvely attempting to understand the man behind the math. Brian tells me he went to New York City public schools, then Harvard, then Oxford. But the conversation keeps drifting to Brian’s science. Every answer ends with an oblique reference to physics. 

Only 32 blocks from here, on West 81st Street in Manhattan, is where Brian grew up. His mother was a secretary for a veterinarian. His father was a composer for Off-Broadway musicals. “My dad wrote popular tunes. Some were a little successful in the ’60s, but in general it was a struggle for him. I think it’s hard to create something, to really devote your life to something, and not be able to share it.” Brian pauses, perhaps admiring the irony of his devotion to sharing something considerably more abstruse than a show tune. “I think, though, that if I weren’t a physicist I would be a musician,” he says. Brian segues to allusions of “harmonic equations” and “cosmic symphonies”; to octaves beyond the range of the human ear. His answers become noticeably longer. His words betray a genuine excitement, as if they’ve been liberated from the limitations of our ordinary world. His sentences freely stretch out, describing in poetry the vastness of the universe they describe. I flip to a clean page in my notebook. 


Spacetime, the odd compound word that’s used to describe the structure the universe hangs on, remains persistently vague. No one knows what, if anything, holds everything all together. Ever since Leibniz, a seventeenth-century philosopher who criticized Newton, some theorists have postulated that space is an illusion. According to this school of thought, if the galaxies were completely empty, then there would be no space. But whether or not space exists is a metaphysical question that doesn’t normally arise on a Friday evening. The world seems designed to preclude doubts about three-dimensional certainty. After all, we live on a full world, teeming with stuff, and we live contently assuming that space is composed of that stuff. If space doesn’t exist, then what about the inside of Brian’s apartment? What about the view of New Jersey? If Leibniz is right, then where the hell am I? 

These are the questions on my mind. But physics ignores my angst; it must find laws that operate in the silence of emptiness. It searches for the constants hiding behind all our surfaces. And physics, to its credit, has done a decent job of shedding light on the invisible. We know about atoms, black holes, and photons. But what of the essence? What of the ether that binds? We still don’t know if space, or time, is real. We don’t know what connects matter, probably because we don’t know what matter is really made of. In other words, the essence of everything is a complete fucking mystery. 


String theory, the newfangled physics trying to answer for the universe, has its origins in a theoretical failure of cosmic proportions. By the ’30s, physicists realized that there were two distinct explanations for the nature of the universe, both of which were expermentally verified yet stated that the other one made absolutely no sense. Either the universe was schizophrenic, or physics had made a slight mistake. 

The first inklings of this contradiction came with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. For the first time, physics had a reliable and rigorous framework for describing the universe on the grandest of scales, the geography of galaxies, stars, and planets. Unfortunately, Einstein’s theory collapses when applied to the small stuff. From the point of view of the atom or the photon, general relativity produces impossible answers. The equations are ugly. To satisfy this other universe, physics came up with quantum mechanics, a theory that disowns Einstein. Brian summarizes the quantum world as “microscopic weirdness.” 

But weird doesn’t begin to do justice to the quantum world. Quantum mechanics is simply nonsensical; it contradicts all conventions of our reality. For example, it doesn’t believe in banal things like definite positions, or that an object can move through space at a certain speed and be understood. But thankfully for life on Earth, particles only begin behaving in quantum terms when studied on the most invisible of levels. We’re talking about the subatomic world, a scenery populated by such crumbs as electrons, muons, taus, muon neutrinos, and quarks of all directions. It’s a strange, unsatisfying zoo; a vaguely proven collection of entities that just might be the fundamental particles of the universe. Physics has searched for these outlaws for a long time. It has captured them at rare moments, mostly as ghostly insinuations in particle accelerators and cosmic radiation. According to quantum physics, these strangely named particles are as small as matter gets. 

But these rather incongruous bits are kind of embarrassing. As a theory of everything, they leave a lot to be desired, at least according to Brian: “First of all, why are there so many different particles? That feels wrong. The world shouldn’t have so many ingredients. Everything should begin from a more synchronous place.” String theory searches for that place. And if you believe Brian, the totally invisible thing that composes everything, everything, is a string, a vibrating loop of string. When they gave a name to string theory, they were being literal. 

Struggling with this image, I look around Brian’s stripped apartment. An empty cube, full of edges where dust has gathered. The late light streams in the window in long angles, the dust floating on its photons. Is dust made of strings? 

Brian was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford when string theory was first announced in 1984. In a stunning paper that “caused particle physicists by the hundreds to drop their research projects,” John Schwarz and Michael Green postulated a universe built of strings. According to Brian, before their landmark paper, particle physics was defined by the Standard Model of the atom, a theory as orthodox as its name implies. Particle physics was the physics; its conquering of spacetime seemed inevitable. “The Standard Model was in place, and its remarkable success at predicting experimental outcomes indicated that its verification was merely a matter of details. But six months later [after the Green/Schwarz paper], the mood had completely swung around.” Strings were the details. 

Brian learned physics in a time of revolution. The Standard Model was being dismantled. Nothing was sacred. So Brian joined the rebel “string theorists,” a rather dorky insurgent group that was trying to solve “equations that were just too hard to understand.” They would work deep into the night, studying the vast areas of theoretical physics re-quired to understand these non-particles. It’s now 20 years later, the rebels are in power, string theory is the future, and still, no one really knows what string theory is saying. Some believe the strings are “smeared-out loops.” But how is a loop different from a string? Furthermore, if the strings are always vibrating, as if on a violin, then who has the bow? 


All those galactic ambiguities aren’t stopping Brian from trying to convert me. He’s a missionary. I lean in, peeling myself off the back of my chair. My face is moist with sweat. I’m relieved when Brian also has to wipe the salty beads from his forehead. Sitting in the empty, white-walled room, with little else to absorb Brian’s metaphorical banter, is beginning to feel intense. The ficus stands alone in the corner, managing to appear perfectly content. 

“Look,” Brian says, in a calm, collected tone that does little justice to the outlandish things he’s impressing upon me, “the old theory was the unsatisfying one. The new theory, string theory, makes sense. It says there is only one thing, strings. What they become, what muon or atom they form, depends on their vibration. These strings can vibrate in different ways. That’s it. Now that feels right. From complexity to simplicity, from extravagance to economy. That’s string theory. If string theory isn’t right, it would be a colossal practical joke. The math fits together so wonderfully, and the ideas are so tightly woven in a manner that just feels right, that it’s hard to believe nature would be that cruel and not make it the truth.” 

The idea of something “feeling right,” of a set of equations being objectively beautiful, is the flimsy reasoning upon which string theory pivots. It’s multi-variable aesthetics. There is absolutely no experimental evidence that supports string theory. No one has seen a string. No one has seen one of the supersymmetric mirror particles that string theory predicts are everywhere. And no one has found the eight missing dimensions that apparently compose the stringy fabric of spacetime. I ask Brian if this absence of data worries him, if he lies awake at night worrying that string theory is merely convoluted metaphysics. His answer doesn’t console me: “I do worry. If this is a per-manent state of affairs, string theory is in big trouble. Hopefully we can test something someday, but we are dealing with a layer of the universe that is beyond our ability to see.” 

So then how is string theory science? It seems to be closer to philosophy or religion—schools of thought that deal with those aspects of existence that lie beyond the scope of technology. Karl Popper, the eminent Viennese philosopher, said science is defined by the falsifiability doctrine. Science never proves anything true, he said; it merely proves things false. It proceeds in stuttering steps, advancing by saying what theories are wrong. Truth is what survives. 

String theory violates this dictum. I ask Brian what experimental data could disprove string theory. “To be honest,” he says, “not very much. If we never find strings, or those eight missing dimensions, we can simply say that the parameters are smaller than we expected.” So string theory can never admit it’s wrong? Brian’s unfazed: “For a physicist, it’s hard to deny something as elegant as string theory. First of all, string theory unifies the realms of gravity and quantum mechanics. Second, modern physics has found a series of key ideas, concepts like spin and supersymmetry, that emerge naturally from string theory. The universe just kind of unravels itself once you have the idea of strings.” 

The big promise of string theory is that it will provide a rigorous answer to why the universe exists in its current form: It will tell us if the rules for the cosmos are somehow inevitable, or if the universe is governed by a random collection of mere suggestions—rules no more necessary than poetic meter. Did God have a choice in making the laws of physics? Or was he playing dice? 

These are, as Brian says, big, juicy questions. String theory hopes that its equations, when finally articulated, will give an answer that looks just like the universe we inhabit; that the properties of space—our space—will emerge melli-fluously from strings. 

But there are serious problems. To begin with, when strings are postulated as the fundamental particle, there are simply too many universes. The stringy equations describe an infinite set of possible spaces. But which one is ours? Which abstract answer are we? Tragically, string theory may be doomed by its excess of solutions. I look out the window. I try to imagine a thousand different New Jerseys. They still all look the same. 


This surfeit of answers hasn’t slowed— indeed, has perhaps catalyzed—the escalation of string theory’s rhetoric. Brian likes the phrase “The Ultimate Theory” (it’s on the front of his book), but other string theorists favor “M Theory,” roughly translated as “Mother Theory.” All of string theory’s affectionate nicknames reveal its divine pretensions. String theory wants to be a religion. It wants to explain everything. Unfortunately, it can’t escape its arcane mathematical roots. String theory is like a Bible written in ancient Aramaic. 

And as Brian attempts to explain it to me, waving his arms in what appear to be non-Euclidian patterns, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that someone made this into a television show. The very obscurity of string theory, the fact that no one can honestly profess to understand it, is what makes its recent emergence into pop culture all the more strange. No one is more astounded by string theory’s success than Brian. “When I wrote The Elegant Universe, I expected a very small audience. Say what you will, but that book is not easy. I wrote it because I love telling stories, and I thought that a brief history of string theory, how it had evolved and consequently changed our view of spacetime, would make a good story. It’s not about any individual person or discovery. It’s about the human endeavor to figure out the universe in which we find ourselves.” 

And where there’s an answer, even if it’s merely a guess, there’s an audience. People want to know. String theory may represent a strange twist on the idea of experimental science, but it’s an undeniably noble endeavor to attempt a translation of its findings. Brian is trying to make public the invisible. In the post-Newtonian world, scientific progress has come at the cost of transparency. As science reveals truth, it also progresses toward fields of ever more recondite detail, vocabularies occluded by more and more acronyms. It gets harder to understand. In an age defined by science, we often seem sadly resigned to living in total ignorance of its process. We depend on our conduits, on a guy like Brian, to translate mathematical tongues. We want to believe him, even when what he says contradicts what we know. We listen because he is the voice of reason, because he understands the math and we couldn’t get past algebra. We trust science. But the trust is naïve; it’s dependent on our ignorance. We don’t want to know about the flaws in a theory, or about the subjectivity in an ex-periment, or about the total absence of data. All we want is the answer. In our in-finite curiosity, we are vulnerable. 

Brian has chosen to be the scientific face we trust. This is a role to which he seems well-suited. Ever since Einstein, pop culture has imagined scientists as a breed apart, as supreme thinkers who never brush their hair. Brian always brushes his hair. Watching him on television, he blends seamlessly into the primped faces on the other channels. Normally, this would be an uninteresting fact. The world is filled with comely people. But when viewed in the context of his mind, when juxtaposed against the density of his physics, Brian’s looks become a conspicuous characteristic: Qualified by his other talents, they’re something you can’t help but notice—or feel compelled to note. 

But why would Brian want to become string theory’s face? After all, nothing is guaranteed to cheapen one’s reputation among scientists faster than appearing on television, selling to the masses a still-controversial theory. But Brian, ever the spokesperson, has an answer ready: “As a child, I loved Carl Sagan. He was a truly wonderful communicator of ideas. He wanted to share the next step. I aspired to something similar.” But how sincere is the Sagan comparison? Sagan was more television star than physicist. He was a promoter of space travel and the search for aliens. His research focused on why Mars is red, a question closer in method to Galileo than to string theory. And Sagan, at least, had data. 

Brian’s science is fragile. It’s a theory that’s busy being born. It might be true. But television is not the ideal format for showcasing an intellectual struggle. Brian defends his miniseries: “You know, most scientists I talk to love the idea that we are trying to express concepts that we don’t yet completely understand. If I’ve gotten any kind of questioning feedback from the scientific community, it’s been, ‘This is just too soon.’ But I disagree. I think it’s important to show the struggle. The general public doesn’t need to be protected. Tax dollars pay for this stuff. And I think people love a status report. They love an honest attempt to describe the universe.” But how honest is the translation? 


The Elegant Universe is dense with metaphor, a story told so well one can’t help but be suspicious. Everything from ants on a garden hose to an amusement park ride are woven into explanations of arcane physics. Brian’s sentences often revolve around the fragile word like. Strings are like a garden hose. These similes make Brian’s physics somehow comprehensible, giving flesh to an otherwise ethereal theory. Yet despite the illusion of truth, metaphors are inherently corrupt, trafficking in imperfect comparisons. The situation seems especially shaky when the metaphorical starting point is itself so unreal. The words taunt us with a world that makes sense. 

Is Brian teasing us? Do his fellow physicists see him as more poet than scientist? Brian hopes not: “My feeling has always been that I wanted to be so true to the science that no one could question whether or not I made it accessible at the expense of losing the essence. There is this real gap between the mathematics and the metaphor, which is how one can express it.” 

So is the real story forever private? Does it vanish the moment we leave the pristine world of numbers? Isn’t math merely an approximation of the universe? I think sometimes we forget that numbers are an invention, that we paste them onto nature like an accurate zodiac. Math is a metaphor we use to describe the universe, a hygienic version of a dirty world. Why would Brian make a television miniseries so confused in approximations? 

“I’m acutely aware that every metaphor fails at some point. Only the math really works. And I usually point out that the loop doesn’t work, or the garden hose is flawed. It’s the best you can do with metaphor—I try to discard the aspects that don’t work. It’s hard, though. It is a very fine line between a great metaphor and one that goes too far. But I enjoy trying to find the essence of a theory, and trying to make it entertaining while not making it untrue. It’s challenging.” Brian pauses. He lowers his voice a little: “Occasionally, I’ll get a letter, a long and serious letter, from a reader who took the metaphor seriously. They give me this whole analysis of string theory based on some metaphor in the book. Sometimes they’ll even come up with their own theory. I never know what to say.” 

As I listen to Brian, I can’t help but wonder what he is thinking of my questions. Am I taking his metaphors too seriously? Bewildered by his eloquence, I’m forgetting that on some level this is actually math. What is true and what is almost true? I drink some more water. Metaphysics is making me thirsty. A rare breeze enters through the window, ruffling the stillness, nudging the leaves of the ficus. Where does the math end and the real world begin? 


The first time I saw Brian he was giving a talk in New York City. He was speaking about time travel, and the auditorium was packed. I was astonished. I couldn’t believe that hundreds of ordinary people, many of them older and retired, had chosen to see a string theorist talk about pure conjecture. And Brian didn’t disappoint. For over an hour he mesmerized the crowd with the patently outlandish, attempting to explain the messiness of spacetime. It was a heroically silly act. Watching Brian tease out the three-dimensional implications of string theory, I marveled at the earnestness of his struggle. He really wanted us to understand. Because to him, the math was very beautiful. And so here he was, on a stage with a spotlight, trying to reconcile a cosmic paradox. He said things like, “According to science, time doesn’t have a direction. There is nothing in the equations which would imply that time only goes one way.” I remember an elderly lady sitting in front of me nodding her head in affirmation, as if this were an idea that makes sense. It isn’t. 

But how could one disagree with the institution of “science,” especially when it came embodied in such a nice young man? (Brian knew his audience that evening; the conversation was peppered with warm allusions to his mother.) Brian was so eloquent, so coherent. He was always referencing the disembodied equations of “the math” or “the science,” and by the end of the talk he had become something akin to the oracle at Delphi. One wanted to thank him for taking the time to inform us of the Truth, to answer questions from an audience that had ignorantly assumed time went forward in a seamless flow. We were wrong. All of us. When the talk was over, the lady gently tapped her husband on the arm. He had been napping. “Boy, you missed it,” she said. “He told us how to travel to the future.” 

But now there’s only me and Brian and New Jersey, and I’m asking the questions. The sun is sinking; the only wavelength left in the sky is red. It’s late, and Brian looks tired, a touch of frustration peeking through his charm. He would probably prefer a cold shower to more of my questions. But I’m beginning to really worry about the methodology of string theory. Not just because Brian’s metaphors are so seductive, but because the solution of string theory seems so needed, so weirdly inevitable. It’s as if physicists just couldn’t handle an ugly universe, a spacetime with too many ingredients, so they dreamt up a final theory; they went with the better story. But what if galaxies are just homely? Could we ever forgive the stars for being imperfect? 

The fact is, we do seem to like being surrounded by an immaculate space. Most religions have a god that is absolute. It’s depressing to contemplate a universe of contingency, a place where gravity might be different out by Alpha Centauri. Physics is based in the idea that its laws are universal. There can be only one physics, one set of fundamental laws. String theory seems oddly designed to meet this aesthetic need, turning the absence of experimental data into a surfeit of answers. Should a science be nervous if, along with The Elegant Universe, its audience also buys The Celestine Prophecy? I ask Brian if it really matters if one substitutes the word “spirit,” as in God, for strings. If there is no data, then how are strings different from the divine? Brian thoughtfully pauses and takes a sip of water. Night has somehow settled in on our conversation. The room is dark. Brian hasn’t turned on a light. We have talked our way to God. I can see Brian struggle with this question, vaguely aware that religion is be-yond the domain of math; that he can’t just reference the equations to explain the Bible. 

He answers in his most soothing, conciliatory voice: “You’re right. Some-one who believes in ‘spirit’ can explain anything, too. God might be true. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. But the spirit explanation isn’t that useful. Once you invoke God, you can’t make other predictions. I can use math and string theory to make a thousand other predictions about what might be real. And I can test them. So the difference between spirit and strings lies more in utility. Spirit is just not a useful way to think about the universe. Every question has the same answer.” 

For physicists, the God explanation is too predictable. And compared to the postulates of string theory, God seems rather staid, boring almost. God only has three dimensions, four if you include time. String theory has 11. It used to have ten, but in 1995, Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading string theorists, proposed the idea of one more. Brian was at the conference, a kabbalistic gathering of 400 of the world’s leading string theorists, where Witten first presented the idea. “The room just went silent. Before 1995, there seemed to be five different and equally valid theories that could approximate the essence of string theory. What Witten showed was that if one begins at an unfamiliar starting point—that of 11 dimensions instead of the previous ten—the five equations that before looked separate are all sitting inside the new 11-dimensional theory. It’s like a kaleidoscope that one can look through and, with a little twisting, see the other five theories. It was a tremendous insight.” 

Witten’s 11-dimensional version of string theory represented a seminal mo-ment in the history of physics. The theoretical shift reminds me of a scene in the classic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. The lead guitarist is explaining to the interviewer, Rob Reiner, why their amps are better because the volume dial goes to 11, rather than the standard ten. “They’re very, very special,” he says proudly. But Reiner is incredulous: Why not just make volume ten louder? The guitarist is silent for several moments: “But these go to 11.” 

Who could have imagined that the cosmic dial also goes to 11? What does it mean that the quilt of space has eight hidden dimensions? Can you imagine an 11-dimensional space? If you can, you’re clearly a liar. Because you can’t imagine 11 dimensions. No one can. It’s a sincere limit of the human brain. We are trapped, for better or worse, in the apparently false façade of three dimensions. It is the sad reality we are condemned to, at least according to string theory. 

In other words, string theory is a fundamental break with the history of science. Even if the equations for string theory are perfect one day—a possibility that is very far away at the moment—we still won’t be able to conceive of what they really mean. The best we’ll ever be able to hope for is a mere glimpse into their implications, a metaphorical understanding of what all the numbers and variables and extra dimensions might mean if only our brains were a little bigger. It is a cruel and tender irony that the only way we will ever understand the galactic fundaments is in our imagination, without the help of the universe. When it comes to the deepest of questions, we are all alone. The stars (and God) have decided to be silent on the matter. 


Brian seems to revel in this aspect of string theory: “The most stunning experiences in life are the ones where you don’t have to go anywhere, the moments when your mind takes you somewhere else completely.” While I’m troubled by their solipsistic nature, Brian genuinely enjoys these fantastical imaginings so amply supplied by string theory. When he talks about his galactic daydreams, digressing into theories of atomic teleportation or worm holes, his hands flutter a little and a knowing smile sneaks across his face. His sentences, always writerly and eloquent, take on a touch of exuberance. Sometimes it feels like he’s trying to sell you the universe. 

“I end my new book with a chapter, kind of a light musing, on some of the stranger implications of string theory and modern physics. I go into time travel, stuff like that. For example, there is this one recent idea that everything is a hologram and that the bulk, the real arena, exists far away, on a surface bounding the universe.” 

I don’t know what to say to that one. So I touch my chair, then my arm. I certainly don’t feel like a hologram. But what if I am? What if physics decides that I am merely a two-dimensional play of light? What if string theory really knows everything, and realizes ordinary life is all wrong? What if someone actually solves string theory? What if the equations work? Brian sees my worried look and interrupts my stream of questions: “I think Richard Feynman said that a final theory was like learning the rules of chess. It’s only once you learn the rules that you can actually start playing. Physics is still just trying to figure out how to move the pieces. Maybe one day we will actually be able to play. So a final theory is really a beginning for physics, not an end. It’s when the game begins.” 

The other alternative is that physics could solve the universe and no one would care. Even if physics tells us we live in 11 dimensions, we still won’t. Hu-mans, regardless of the cosmic truth, will still be inside our bubble of three dimensions, content to live out our days on a watery little planet where time always goes one way and where space is “real.” So I tell Brian to forget black holes for a minute and worry about more mundane things. Will string theory ever be used to shed light on our world? Brian doesn’t know: “There are many levels at which we can describe phenomena. I challenge anyone to see the mind or consciousness in terms of string theory. Even if strings are the fundamental thing, it doesn’t mean we can explain everything with it.” 

Basically, if string theory is the essence, science is in a paradoxical position. It has discovered the theory of ev-erything that might explain nothing. String theory forces us to decide who we trust more, math or our senses. How much of our reality are we willing to sacrifice in order to satisfy the abstruse needs of our equations? What’s more real, us or numbers? 

We will probably never know the answer to that question. Our imagination is limited by the physiology of our minds: We think, therefore we are. String theory stretches the limits of our thought, a balloon blown too big, perhaps. But that’s what humans do. The wondering passes the time. 

It’s late now. I finish my water and check the ficus. It seems to have wilted a bit. 

Maybe one day there will be the answer. In the meantime, we have the night sky. If one escapes the city lights, stars glimmer in seemingly random patterns. When I stare upward, I can see only the Big Dipper and those three stars that form someone’s belt. But in that same seeming darkness, Brian sees potential data. “Maybe we can read the pattern of the Big Bang’s inflation through microwave background radiation one day. That would be incredible. Really, that would be. We could confirm the theory of the ultra small through observation of the very big. And that would be poetry.” 

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