-- 139 --

But even if we cannot prove that the two theories are dual, the perfect alignment between those properties we can extract with
confidence provides extremely compelling evidence that the conjectured strong-weak coupling relationship between the Type I and
Heterotic-O string theories is correct. In fact, increasingly clever calculations that have been performed to test the proposed duality
have all resulted in positive results. Most string theorists are convinced that the duality is true.

Following the same approach, one can study the strong coupling properties of another of the remaining string theories, say, the
Type IIB string. As originally conjectured by Hull and Townsend and supported by the research of a number of physicists,
something equally remarkable appears to occur. As the coupling constant of the Type IIB string gets larger and larger, the physical
properties that we are still able to understand appear to match up exactly with that of the weakly coupled Type IIB string itself. In
other words, the Type IIB string is self-dual.106 Specifically, detailed analysis persuasively suggests that if the Type IIB coupling
constant were larger than 1, and if we were to change its value to its reciprocal (whose value, therefore, is less than 1), the resulting
theory is absolutely identical to the one we started with. Similar to what we found in trying to squeeze a circular dimension to a
sub-Planck-scale length, if we try to increase the Type IIB coupling to a value larger than 1, the self-duality shows that the
resulting theory is precisely equivalent to the Type IIB string with a coupling smaller than 1.

A Summary, So Far

Let's see where we are. By the mid-1980s, physicists had constructed five different superstring theories. In the approximation
scheme of perturbation theory, they all appear to be distinct. But this approximation method is valid only if the string coupling
constant in a given string theory is less than 1. The expectation has been that physicists should be able to calculate the precise value
of the string coupling constant in any given string theory, but the form of the approximate equations currently available makes this
impossible. For this reason, physicists aim to study each of the five string theories for a range of possible values of their respective
coupling constants, both less than and greater than 1—i.e., both weak and strong coupling. But traditional perturbative methods
give no insight into the strong coupling characteristics of any of the string theories.

Recently, by making use of the power of supersymmetry, physicists have learned how to calculate some of the strong coupling
properties of a given string theory. And to the surprise of most everyone in the field, the strong coupling properties of the
Heterotic-O string appear to be identical to the weak coupling properties of the Type I string, and vice versa. Moreover, the strong
coupling physics of the Type IIB string is identical to its own properties when its coupling is weak. These unexpected links
encourage us to follow Witten and press on to the other two string theories, Type IIA and Heterotic-E, to see how they fit into the
overall picture. Here we will find even more exotic surprises. To prepare ourselves, we need a brief historical digression.

Supergravity

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the surge of interest in string theory, many theoretical physicists sought a unified theory
of quantum mechanics, gravity, and the other forces in the framework of point-particle quantum field theory. The hope was that the
inconsistencies between point-particle theories involving gravity and quantum mechanics would be overcome by studying theories
with a great deal of symmetry. In 1976 Daniel Freedman, Sergio Ferrara, and Peter Van Nieuwenhuizen, all then of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, discovered that the most promising were those involving supersymmetry, since the
tendency of bosons and fermions to give cancelling quantum fluctuations helps to calm the violent microscopic frenzy. The authors
coined the term supergravity to describe supersymmetric quantum field theories that try to incorporate general relativity. Such
attempts to merge general relativity with quantum mechanics ultimately met with failure. Nevertheless, as mentioned in Chapter 8,
there was a prescient lesson to be learned from these investigations, one that presaged the development of string theory.

The lesson, which perhaps became most clear through the work of Eugene Cremmer, Bernard Julia, and Scherk, all of the Ecole
Normale Supérieure in 1978, was that the attempts that came closest to success were supergravity theories formulated not in four
dimensions, but in more. Specifically, the most promising were the versions calling for ten or eleven dimensions, with eleven
dimensions, it turns out, being the maximal possible.107 Contact with four observed dimensions was accomplished in the
framework, once again, of Kaluza and Klein: The extra dimensions were curled up. In the ten-dimensional theories, as in string
theory, six dimensions were curled up, while seven were curled up for the eleven-dimensional theory.

106
This is a close analog of the R, 1/R duality discussed previously If we call the Type 1/R string coupling constant gIIB then the statement that appears to be true is that the values gIIB and
1/gIIB describe the same physics. gIIB is big, 1/gIIB is small, and vice versa.
107
If all but four dimensions are curled up, a theory with more than eleven total dimensions necessarily gives rise to massless particles with spin greater than 2, something that both
theoretical and experimental considerations rule out.