Joachim Noller

The superstring theory: physics with music

Translation: Philip Marston

The superstring theory is one of the great projects of our time in physics, a work in progress physicists have been working on for decades now. The term superstring has become so semantically (super)charged that it has also made it extremely difficult for the physicists involved in the research to find the appropriate language in which to describe the theory. Too many associations are intertwined in it: the explanation of our material world, how it is constructed, how it came into existence (it is hoped to gain insights into the so-called Big Bang and its consequences), to integrate aspects which have up to now been viewed as different (e.g. different forces), to expand the categories we think in (for instance, strings move in a multi-[e.g. 10-]dimensional universe). But even allowing all the progress that has been made, whereby many proofs are still outstanding, old problems still play a role: science is still focused on the smallest, indivisible (i.e., atomic in the etymological sense of the word) particles. The path led via electrons to the quarks, various species of quarks, to a confusing multiplicity which seems almost post-modern in its wilful complexity. Science started out on a quest for a principle which would reunite the multiplicity of different (subatomic) particles and imagined this unity once again as a particle, but this time not as an element of a microplanetary system, a spherical form shrunk to a point, but as a thread, a filament: and since a filament can vibrate in different modes, this soon came to be compared to a string (like that of a musical instrument) which can be made to vibrate and thus to sound a note. The various different elementary particles which are already known or scientifically postulated (not just electrons and quarks, but also photons or the as yet unverified graviton, the “gravity particle”), would be generated, according to this idea, by different vibratory states of the one and only basic particle, the string; put another way, a string, depending on what vibratory state it was excited into, would assume the properties of an electron, a photon etc., and function as such, appear as such. Superstring theorists use the example of a violin or guitar string, which can produce different notes, meaning first and foremost pitches, to visualize this. If we stay with the logic of this image, the string is however not “played” from outside, but “chooses” to sound one of many possible notes in accordance with the inherent nature of the system. This line of metaphorical explanation does not correspond to the selection of pitches by mechanical influences working on the string, but the play of natural harmonics, the exploitation of a spectrum of overtones, or upper partials. Every note played on a violin is in reality a sound with an audible fundamental note and overtones, the mix of which determines its characteristic tone colour. In the string model, each partial could assume dominance in place of the fundamental, would be brought into the foreground by certain “resonance” phenomena, and the other partials would be phenotypically de-activated, while still being genotypically present.

Strings making music – a symphony of strings – a universe of sounds: the terms physicists use to describe this betray a certain historical legacy, named after the Greek philosopher Pythagoras and his school, which has, transformed into a host of different forms, left its mark on our western way of thinking. The harmonism implied in the string theory seems prefigured in the idea of the music of the spheres, one of the archetypal images of the European perception of the world (which can equally well be instrumentalized for esoteric purposes). According to Pythagoras, the cosmos consists of eight spheres, which could be allocated to the planets known in his time, including the Sun and the Moon, as well as – combined on one sphere - the firmament of the stars. On each of these spheres, which describe different rotatory movements, heavenly bodies produce notes, which combine to form the harmony of the spheres. This consists of a scale, which gave rise to various different interpretations during the course of Pythagorean tradition (e.g. as a seven-degree diatonic scale, whereby the eighth note sounds the octave of the first). The sound produced is at any rate not a consonant chord, but a sort of celestial cluster, which resembles the background noise in nature and the cosmos rather than euphonic music. The sound material appears in toto, and with it the underlying tone system, in concordance with (literally a con-c[h]ord), attuned to the cosmic order. Celestial music – also on the symbolic level[1] - appears as an interplay structured in such a way as to be harmonious, not in the sense we normally understand it in music, but in accordance with a holistic perception, i.e., one which brings everything together.

The idea of the superstrings as a metaphor seems to pay homage to the “harmony of the spheres” in a very radical way, as a spectralism which has its foundations in the laws of nature[2]: the world is made of strings which occur in different vibratory states and in doing so generate a total music in which the entire spectrum of partial tones is unfolded. We are not so much interested in the musicological implications of this, but what music here symbolizes, the modality of what is and how it can be perceived. “Elegant” was the word used by Brian Greene, who was instrumental in disseminating the theory in popular books on science, to describe such attempts to find a unitary explanation for disparity; perhaps too elegant when we consider that cultural studies and the social sciences postulate a heterogeneous or even “fractured” view of the world as the basis of any authentic knowledge.

Yet views of the world are generated by fundamental scientific research too, and should be discussed in this case not only from the standpoint of scientific history, but also as something factored into the typical cultural awareness of our time. Is the superstring theory perhaps attributable to a certain longing for harmony, a compulsion to find homogeneity and coherence which runs through scientific tradition, while on the other side the activity of the human mind in the arts, assuming it in its complacency to be self-evidently true, tends to absolutize heterogeneous and dissociative attributes? It may seem surprising (or perhaps it is only the logical complement) when at the end of a phase of culture which saw the emancipation of dissonance, we are considering a view of the world predicated on harmony. Does the string model provide support against a ritualistically Modernist aesthetic of the shattered mirror and in favour of a conservative and ahistorical “naturalism”? Or does it help to give us a new perspective on the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, for example on the symbolic figure of Arnold Schönberg, hated by traditionalists, by whom dissonances - legitimized by remote overtone relationships – were admitted into the great sounding harmony?

Numerous writers or visual artists of classical Modernism looked to music as a paradigm in which their art could be brought into a mirror-like relationship to the entirety of the world and the totality of existence, while others rejected this totality and its representation as an illusion. The French musicologist Jules Combarieu, for example, described a deep gulf separating the voices of nature from those of humanity: “La Nature fait une musique large, pacifique, joyeuse, et le Monde, en voguant dans l’espace, est enveloppé d’harmonie. L’Humanité au contraire donne un son qui ‘grince’, comme celui que produirait un archet d’airain sur une lyre de fer; ce n’est plus une symphonie: ce sont des cris!”[3]. If we are to believe Combarieu, music has the task of penetrating to that profound harmony which nature possesses. At the time this essay was published, however (1907), eminent composers were already reflecting the screams of humanity, with increasingly radical means; they devoted themselves in artistic practice as well as in theoretical deliberations to the “voices of humanity”, and not a few of them regarded the “voices of nature” as a historical relict, if not indeed as an intellectual delusion. Perhaps research in physics today can give an impulse to art so that repressed domains of reality can not only be recalled to mind, but given a new valuation. He who perceives the symphony of the strings is not obliged to be deaf to the cries of humanity. A theory of the exact sciences could thus also attain cultural relevance, even while it – and the outcome is open – is still itself on the test bed.