-- 110 --

A smaller radius more strictly confines a string and therefore, through quantum-mechanical claustrophobia, increases the amount
of energy in its motion. So, as the radius of the circular dimension decreases, the energy of motion of the string necessarily
increases—the hallmark feature of an inverse proportionality. Second, as found in the preceding section, the winding mode
energies are directly—not inversely—proportional to the radius. Remember, this is because the minimum length of wound strings,
and hence their minimum energy, is proportional to the radius. These two observations establish that large values of the radius
imply large winding energies and small vibration energies, whereas small values of the radius imply small winding energies and
large vibration energies.

This leads us to the key fact: For any large circular radius of the Garden-hose universe, there is a corresponding small circular
radius for which the winding energies of strings in the former universe equal the vibration energies of strings in the latter, and
vibration energies of strings in the former equal winding energies of strings in the latter. As physical properties are sensitive to the
total energy of a string configuration—and not to how the energy is divided between vibration and winding contributions—there is
no physical distinction between these geometrically distinct forms for the Garden-hose universe. And so, strangely enough, string
theory claims that there is no difference whatsoever between a "fat" Garden-hose universe and a "thin" one.

It's a cosmic hedging of bets, somewhat akin to what you, as a smart investor, should do if faced with the following puzzle.
Imagine you learn that the fate of two stocks trading on Wall Street—say, a company making fitness machines and a company
making heart-bypass valves—are inextricably connected. They each closed trading today valued at one dollar per share, and you
are told by a reliable source that if one company's stock goes up the other's will go down, and vice versa. Moreover, your source—
who is completely trustworthy (but whose guidance might be crossing over legal boundaries)—tells you that the next day's closing
prices of these two companies are absolutely certain to be inversely related to one another. That is, if one stock closes at $2 per
share, the other will close at $½ (50 cents) per share; if one stock closes at $10 per share, the other will close at $1/10 (10 cents) per
share, and so on. But the one thing your source can't tell you is which stock will close high and which will close low. What do you
do?

Well, you immediately invest all of your money in the stock market, equally divided between the shares of these two companies.
As you can easily check by working out a few examples, no matter what happens on the next day, your investment cannot lose
value. At worse it can remain the same (if both companies again close at $1), but any movement of share prices—consistent with
your insider information—will increase your holdings. For instance, if the fitness company closes at $4 and the heart-valve
company closes at $¼ (25 cents), their combined value is $4.25 (for each pair of shares), compared with $2 the previous day
Furthermore, from the perspective of net worth, it does not matter one bit whether the fitness company closes high and the heart-
valve company low, or vice versa. If you care only about the total amount of money, these two distinct circumstances are
financially indistinguishable.

The situation in string theory is analogous in that the energy in string configurations comes from two sources—vibrations and
windings—whose contributions to the total energy of a string are generally different. But, as we shall see in more detail below,
certain pairs of distinct geometrical circumstances—leading to high-winding-energy/low-vibration-energy or low-winding-
energy/high-vibration-energy—are physically indistinguishable. And, unlike the financial analogy for which considerations beyond
total wealth can distinguish between the two types of stock holdings, there is absolutely no physical distinction between the two
string scenarios.

Actually, we shall see that to make the analogy with string theory tighter, we should consider what would happen if you did not
divide your money equally between the two companies in your initial investment, but bought, say, 1,000 shares of the fitness
company and 3,000 shares of the heart-valve company. Now the total value of your holdings does depend on which company
closes high and which closes low. For instance, if the stocks close at $10 (fitness) and 10 cents (heart-valve), your initial
investment of $4,000 will now be worth $10,300. If the reverse happens—the stocks close at 10 cents (fitness) and $10 (heart-
valve)—your holdings will be worth $30,100 —significantly more.

Nevertheless, the inverse relationship between the closing stock prices does ensure the following. If a friend of yours invests
exactly "opposite" to you—3,000 shares of the fitness company and 1,000 shares of the heart-valve company—then the value of
her holdings will be $10,300 if stocks close valves-high/fitness-low (the same as your holdings in the fitness-high/valves-low
closing) and $30,100 if they close with fitness-high/valves-low (again, the same as your holdings in the reciprocal situation). That
is, from the point of view of total stock value, interchanging which stock closes high and which closes low is exactly compensated
by interchanging the number of shares you own of each company.

Hold this last observation in mind as we now return to string theory and think about the possible string energies in a specific
example. Imagine that the radius of the circular Garden-hose dimension is, say, ten times the Planck length. We will write this as