The following is the first part of an essay that explores string theory as a scientific imaginary, that is, as a complex of images that circulate in various cultural discourses as a form of scientific knowledge.

            But, interestingly, Chapman ends the article on this passage.  As a journalist  committed to an impartial reportorial stance, he does not allow himself the liberty to pontificate on such heady topics, let alone make any truth assertions, but he and his editors permit a ‘testifier’ to do so.  One might even argue that Chapman is allowing Mehring, in a sense, to speak for him as kind of proxy.  For, in a culture whose epistemologies are increasingly fragmented into highly discrete specializations, the only narrators reckless enough to arrogate the authority required to synthesize knowledge into a totality are the clown, the fool, or the artist.  When physicists claim that string theory is a theory of everything, they mean something specific to what the discipline accepts as legitimate problems to be solved within the stringently defined mathematical formalisms of the field.  But, as in this example, when popular discourse evokes string theory as a theory of everything, that everything often grows to include much more that the puzzle-solving taken to be the core of theoretical physics praxis.  Subject to alternate constraints, a fictional treatment of a theory of everything is free to hop disciplinary boundaries, much in the same way that Mehring would have us ‘just somehow hop over to the eleventh dimension, and hop from universe to universe to universe forever inside the eleventh dimension’.

            I will return to Mehring’s disquisition at the end of the chapter, but I first want to introduce a theoretical term that I believe will serve as a useful, if not pivotal, tool in deciphering non-technical texts that evoke string theory.  Much has been made of the supposed schism in contemporary culture between science and the arts, the so-called Two Cultures, named thus by C.P. Snow in his highly influential lecture of 1959.[4]  On the one hand, science cloaks itself in the rigours of logic and empiricism, while on the other, the arts make due with the less rigorous modes of rhetoric and mimesis.  The conventional realist paradigm, originating predominantly in the logical positivist tradition, codifies art and science together into a binary.  In Picturing Science, Producing Art, Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison argue that,

[l]ike all binaries, art and science needed to be yoked together (yet held apart) in order to accrue the strengths of their polar positions: soft versus hard, intuitive versus analytical, inductive versus deductive, visual versus logical, random versus systematic, autonomous versus collaborative […]  The binary production of knowledge (the bifurcation of practices) was equally simple: art invented, science discovered.[5]

Implicit in this paradigm is the conviction that translation of scientific concepts from technical discourse to non-technical discourse necessarily involves, at the very least, oversimplification, and usually, the kinds of distortions and malapropisms to which Sokal and Bricmont so vociferously object.  A central theme of this thesis will be the exploration of that supposed chasm between the science that is string theory and the literary re-production of string theory-sourced scientific ‘ideas’.

            In her work The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, N. Katherine Hayles argues that certain forms of literature are ‘an imaginative response to complexities and ambiguities that are implicit in [scientific] models but that are often not explicitly recognized’.[6]  For the purposes of the study, it will be useful to assume that the imagination functions as the primary vehicle of exchange between the two discursive cultures, but I would argue that Hayles’s statement suffers from a crucial elision, which, in a certain sense, is complicit with the binarism endemic to the Two Cultures paradigm.  If on the one hand, string theory offers us a body of scientific knowledge expressed exclusively in terms of mathematical formalisms, while, on the other hand, since a literary text’s ‘imaginative response’ occurs within a distinct, non-mathematical language, then, assuming that, in general, literary authors are not professionally trained string theorists, a third, at the very least, discursive structure must mediate the exchange between these two discourses.  What I propose is that this intermediary be called a scientific imaginary.  In effect, at its core, this thesis will be a study in intertextuality, of the unidirectional translation of the various scientific imaginaries of string theory from one discursive domain to another.  Although a given string theory scientific imaginary finds its expression in a particular text, I want to explore the extent to which that imaginary might be independent of specific texts.  In this sense, a scientific imaginary would retain its shape, feel, or internal structure as it moves from one text to another, from one discourse to another.

            Before I establish which particular texts warrant consideration, it is important to emphasize that it is insufficient to assume that only one imaginative leap, so to speak, bridges the chasm between technical discourse and popular culture.  The texts I will consider in this thesis are not only direct imaginative responses to the scientific model of string theory as it is expressed in its professional, technical discourse, but also, and most often, to its expression in popularizations.  The following chapter will explore where and how scientific imaginaries arise in the technical discourse of string theory.  But this literature is not what writers—of science-fiction, for example, except perhaps in certain rare cases—consume and subsequently re-produce.  We shall see, predictably, that mathematics dominates the presentation in technical literature and that whatever imagery technical articles might evoke, whether through expository prose or graphic illustration, this imagery plays a secondary, at least in the opinion of the string theorists themselves, role in their narrative strategies.  Yet in string theory popularizations, largely free of mathematical content, imagery takes precedence.  In effect, I want to pay particular attention to one particular intertextual transaction: that of string theory imaginaries that migrate from popularizations to literary texts.

            Authors of literary discourses must necessarily consume a version of string theory before that can re-produce it.  There are isolated examples where authors mention in the paratextual material framing literary works the specific sources for their borrowings from string theory.  Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson describe this process as typically proceeding as follows:

In the case of the historical sequence from the nineteenth-century sciences […] to the twentieth-century sciences […], experimental and theoretical developments have fed into technological innovations, which in turn have been commodified and distributed as cultural practices throughout modern society.[7]

This process could be said to have occurred for such scientific theories as electromagnetism, through the industrial production of electricity, for example. Quantum theory, in turn, gained currency through the proliferation of computers, among a host of technological products—but especially through its connection in the popular imagination with the atomic bomb.  But others, such a Einstein’s theory of special relativity, would seem to lack obvious technological applications.[8]  In these cases, where the science remains predominantly theoretical—as with string theory—what becomes commodified and distributed is not technology per se, in the form of industrial products or gadgetry, but the theoretical concepts themselves.  These concepts, divorced from their mathematical contexts take the form of canonical ideas, images, and anecdotes, such as popular notions of ‘the eleventh dimension’.  They form a kind doxa, a set of stock ideas, images, anecdotes, and scenarios that constitute an imaginary specific to that particular scientific theory.  For example, quantum theory has its double-slit experiment, its image of the wave/particle paradox, and the ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ thought experiment, among many others.[9]  Chapter Four will locate the origins of this stock imagery—what one can consider the core content of a universal string theory imaginary—from its most widely consumed popularizations: Kaku’s Hyperspace, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, and Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages.[10]

            Graham Allen argues that, in general, texts are never autonomous, that they necessarily involve a certain intertextuality.  Every text ‘sets going a plurality of meanings but is also woven out of numerous discourses and spun from already existing meaning.  The text’s plurality is neither wholly an “inside” nor an “outside”, since the text itself is not a unified, isolated object upon which an “inside” and an “outside” can be fixed.’[11]  The technical literature, epitomized by the hep-th section of the lanl.arXiv.org e-Print Archive hosted by Cornell University (which serves as a clearing house for pre-print articles by the theoretical physics community), forms an important part of the technical discourse intertext, which in turn, overlaps and informs the intertext of string theory popularizations, both monographs and mass-market journal and magazine articles, that consequently, feed into the intertext of fiction, plays, or poetry that engages, however indirectly, with string theory.  From this perspective, these myriad, overlapping intertexts function as a resource—out of which emerges the various scientific imaginaries of string theory.

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