96 G The Secret Liji feNature
difference lay in the winding of the electron's strings, which decreased
progressively, as did the size of the pitch and thickness of the helices.
That the electron should display higher-order spirillae that wind
themselves in helices just as they do in the UPA was to be expected,
says Phillips, because both particles are different states of a superstring:
the UPA with its ten whorls is a bundle of ten closed, twenty-six-
dimensional strings; electrons are superstrings without flux tubes em-
anating from them; gluons are single bosonic strings.
Ron Cowen's observations indicate, says Phillips, that space has
more than the six higher dimensions predicted by superstring theory,
dimensions consistent with recent attempts by some string mathemat-
ical theorists to build superstrings out of more fundamental twenty-
six-dimensional bosonic strings, sixteen dimensions of which are
compactified.
Ultimately, as visualized by Ron, both UPA and electron consist of
bubbles that are actually tori, the same "bubbles" described eighty years
earlier by Leadbeater as "holes in koilon, the true aether of space." The
discrepancy between the spherical bubbles observed by Leadbeater and
the doughnuts seen by Ron is explained by Phillips: "Ron's doughnut
was spinning very rapidly and its torus shape was noticeable only when
he slowed down its rotation. Leadbeater did not notice its spinning and
so had no reason to stop its motion; all he saw was the blurred imaged
of a sphere created by a fat torus with a small hole as it rotated and
tumbled in all directions." But the difference in topology between a
sphere and a torus, says Philips, is crucial. Ron's torus (seen as a bubble
by Leadbeater) is actually a two-dimensional cross-section of a string
that extends into fourteen more dimensions of space, and this would
be consistent with the sixteen-dimensional torus, one of the model
spaces that have been considered by string theorists.
This space is generated by sixteen mutually perpendicular one-
dimensional circles and has the topological property that a journey
along any one dimension leads back to the starting point-precisely the
property of the cyclic motion in which Ron found himself trapped.
When Ron found himself lost in what he sensed was a different
kind of space, in a bubble deep in the heart of an electron, "a space