86 fl The Secret L$ of Nature
groups of UPAS were bound together, depicted hundreds of stringlike
configurations or "lines of force" linking UPAS. Such diagrams, as
Phillips points out, are essentially identical to pictures of subatomic
particles appearing in physics research journals today.
Having established in his book that UPAS are the as*yet undetected
constituents of "up" and "down" quarks in the protons and neutrons of
atomic nuclei, Phillips realized in 1984 that there are similarities be-
tween features of the UPA and a superstring that suggest strongly that
the former are simply subquark states of the latter.
In the summer of 1984 two physicists, John Schwarz and Michael
Green, respectively at the California Institute ofTechnology and Lon-
don's Queen Mary College, made what Phillips calls "an exciting dis-
covery." By treating fundamental subatomic particles as extended
objects that look like pieces of string rather than as single points in
space, they eliminated a long-standing problem aaicting quantum
field theory. This, however, required that space-time have ten dimen-
sions instead of Einstein's four. The theory that emerged from this
breakthrough, as described by Phillips, pictures the basic particles of
matter as a kind of vibration taking place along closed curves in a ten-
dimension space-time continuum. All known particles, such as elec-
trons, neutrinos, quarks, and photons are conceived as vibrational and
rotational modes of these stringlike curves or superstrings.
According to this new theory, the physical properties of particles
depend upon the nature of the curled-up or "compactified" six-
dimensional space that exists at every point of ordnary three-dmensional
space. One of the simplest models of such a six-dimensional space is a
"six-dimensional torus" or doughnut in which at every point of three-
dimensional Euclidean space there are six mutually perpendicular one-
dimensional circles around which the superstring winds as it moves
through space.
In what amounts to a major breakthrough, Phillips points out that
I. just as each of the ten whorls of a UPA is a closed curve, so the
favored model of a superstring is that of a closed string or curve;
- each of the 1,680 coils in a UPA whorl is a helix wound around
a torus, and each of the latter's seven turns is another helix wound