82 9 The Secret Lifi of Nature
thrown into more energetic action. To ascertain the number 1,680,
Leadbeater says he meticulously counted the turns in each whorl in
135 different UPAS selected from numerous substances. Each whorl of
the first spirilla he found to be a helix made of seven smaller circular
whorls of second-order spirillae, and so on, through seven orders, each
finer than the preceding one.
By willfully "pressing back and walling off the matter of space,"
Leadbeater identified the seventh- and last-order spirillae as consisting
of seven "bubbles" spaced evenly along the circumference of a circle,
bubbles he referred to as existing in the invisible plenum of space and
to which he gave the name "koilon," from the Greek word meaning
"hollow." Leadbeater calculated that each major whorl consisted of
about 56 million bubbles, which gave a total of some 14 billion bubbles
for each UPA. The theosophists therefore concluded that all matter in
the ultimate analysis must consist of bubbles or holes in space, "like
pearls upon an invisible string." It was a description that two genera-
tions later would tie then1 to the most advanced and challenging con-
cepts of modern physics: the superstring theory and the Higgs field
theory, on the cutting edge of physics, both clearly presaged by
Leadbeater and Besant a century earlier.
The Higgs field theory is a sort of revenant. Way back in the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century, in the time of James Clerk Maxwell,
physicists felt the need for a medium that would pervade all space and
through which light and other electromagnetic waves could travel. To
satisfy these requirements, they postulated ether: an all-pervading, infi-
nitely elastic, massless medium, poetically the personification of the
clear upper air breathed by the Olympians.
What happened to this elixir or quintessential underlying princi-
ple? Einstein, with his special theory of relativity, sent it to join phlo-
giston in the dustbinyet, like the memory of an amputated limb, the
need for ether spookily persisted. What now replaces it for the theo-
retical physicist is a controversial "field" named after a young physicist
from the University of Edinburgh, Peter Higgs, the full dimensions of
which are yet to be known. Some physicists believe it to consist of fun-
damental particles such as the electron; others believe it to be com-