The young Italian Gabriele Veneziano devised a formula that, two years later, would be used by the Japanese-American physicist Yoichiro Nambu to explain several bizarre aspects of quantum mechanics by modeling individual particles as strings rather than points. The key aspect of this theory is that strings, about 100 billion billion times smaller than protons, vibrate in different ways, each becoming the particles that represent the Standard Model. Strings can vibrate consistently only in 10 and 26 dimensions. In 10 dimensions, if the closed string vibrates clockwise, and in 26 dimensions if it vibrates counterclockwise. It is the first time in the history of physics that a quantum theory of gravity exists without infinite results. It is therefore potentially the marbling of wood sought by Einstein. In those 10 and 26 dimensions, “there are enough degrees of freedom” to accommodate all of the physics of the last two thousand years. Relativity is automatically contained in it, and gravity emerges as a requirement of consistency.
