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without relation to anything external."139 Gottfried Leibniz and others vociferously disagreed, claiming that space and time are
merely bookkeeping devices for conveniently summarizing relationships between objects and events within the universe. The
location of an object in space and in time has meaning only in comparison with another. Space and time are the vocabulary of these
relations, but nothing more. Although Newton's view, supported by his experimentally successful three laws of motion, held sway
for more than two hundred years, Leibniz's conception, further developed by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, is much closer to
our current picture. As we have seen, Einstein's special and general theories of relativity firmly did away with the concept of an
absolute and universal notion of space and time. But we can still ask whether the geometrical model of spacetime that plays such a
pivotal role in general relativity and in string theory is solely a convenient shorthand for the spatial and temporal relations between
various locations, or whether we should view ourselves as truly being embedded in something when we refer to our immersion
within the spacetime fabric.

Although we are heading into speculative territory, string theory does suggest an answer to this question. The graviton, the smallest
bundle of gravitational force, is one particular pattern of string vibration. And just as an electromagnetic field such as visible light
is composed of an enormous number of photons, a gravitational field is composed of an enormous number of gravitons—that is, an
enormous number of strings executing the graviton vibrational pattern. Gravitational fields, in turn, are encoded in the warping of
the spacetime fabric, and hence we are led to identify the fabric of spacetime itself with a colossal number of strings all undergoing
the same, orderly, graviton pattern of vibration. In the language of the field, such an enormous, organized array of similarly
vibrating strings is known as a coherent state of strings. It's a rather poetic image—the strings of string theory as the threads of the
spacetime fabric—but we should note that its rigorous meaning has yet to be worked out completely.

Nevertheless, describing the spacetime fabric in this string-stitched form does lead us to contemplate the following question. An
ordinary piece of fabric is the end product of someone having carefully woven together individual threads, the raw material of
common textiles. Similarly, we can ask ourselves whether there is a raw precursor to the fabric of spacetime—a configuration of
the strings of the cosmic fabric in which they have not yet coalesced into the organized form that we recognize as spacetime.
Notice that it is somewhat inaccurate to picture this state as a jumbled mass of individual vibrating strings that have yet to stitch
themselves together into an ordered whole because, in our usual way of thinking, this presupposes a notion of both space and
time—the space in which a string vibrates and the progression of time that allows us to follow its changes in shape from one
moment to the next. But in the raw state, before the strings that make up the cosmic fabric engage in the orderly, coherent
vibrational dance we are discussing, there is no realization of space or time. Even our language is too coarse to handle these ideas,
for, in fact, there is even no notion of before. In a sense, it's as if individual strings are "shards" of space and time, and only when
they appropriately undergo sympathetic vibrations do the conventional notions of space and time emerge.

Imagining such a structureless, primal state of existence, one in which there is no notion of space or time as we know it, pushes
most people's powers of comprehension to their limit (it certainly pushes mine). Like the Stephen Wright one-liner about the
photographer who is obsessed with getting a close-up shot of the horizon, we run up against a clash of paradigms when we try to
envision a universe that is, but that somehow does not invoke the concepts of space or time. Nevertheless, it is likely that we will
need to come to terms with such ideas and understand their implementation before we can fully assess string theory. The reason is
that our present formulation of string theory presupposes the existence of space and time within which strings (and the other
ingredients found in M-theory) move about and vibrate. This allows us to deduce the physical properties of string theory in a
universe with one time dimension, a certain number of extended space dimensions (usually taken to be three), and additional
dimensions that are curled up into one of the shapes allowed by the equations of the theory. But this is somewhat like assessing an
artist's creative talent by requiring that she work from a paint-by-number kit. She will, undoubtedly, add a personal flair here or
there, but by so tightly constraining the format of her work, we are blinding ourselves to all but a slender view of her abilities.
Similarly, since the triumph of string theory is its natural incorporation of quantum mechanics and gravity, and since gravity is
bound up with the form of space and time, we should not constrain the theory by forcing it to operate within an already existing
spacetime framework. Rather, just as we should allow our artist to work from a blank canvas, we should allow string theory to
create its own spacetime arena by starting in a spaceless and timeless configuration.

The hope is that from this blank slate starting point—possibly in an era that existed before the big bang or the pre-big bang (if we
can use temporal terms, for lack of any other linguistic framework)—the theory will describe a universe that evolves to a form in
which a background of coherent string vibrations emerges, yielding the conventional notions of space and time. Such a framework,
if realized, would show that space, time, and, by association, dimension are not essential defining elements of the universe. Rather,
they are convenient notions that emerge from a more basic, atavistic, and primary state.

139
Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Motte and Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), Vol. 1, p. 6.