The result, ironically, is a modern version of the old ether, a vision of so-called empty space cluttered with neutrinos, dark matter, antigravity and multidimensional strings. One of the strangest, of course, is superstring theory, or M-theory, which Cole explains in a brief, lucid chapter. As described by M-theory, the entire universe arises from the harmonics of vibrating strings, membranes, and blobs in eleven dimensions. I was happy to see a science writer pose this question point-blank. It's just the thing.
String theory makes sense only because it solves certain insoluble problems.
Instead, it is encoded on a lower-dimensional surface. Like a hologram, the universe is a projection of the information on this boundary into space. This sounds suspiciously like Hindu dogma to me, but Susskind stumbled on the theory while he was studying something else, and the mathematics have been worked out in detail by the Harvard physicist Juan Maldecena. Since Cole is a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, not a physicist, her style is breezier and less exact than Hawking's. She goes in for too many of the nothing puns and uses certain analogies that aren't airtight, but overall the book is a strong and sometimes mind-blowing introduction to the edges of modern physics.