The Theory Currently Known As M
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2007 The Theory Currently Known as M Jessica Beth Weintraub University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Weintraub, Jessica Beth, "The Theory Currently Known as M. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2007. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/292 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jessica Beth Weintraub entitled "The Theory Currently Known as M." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen Wier, Mary E. Papke, Jinx Watson Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jessica Beth Weintraub entitled “The Theory Currently Known as M.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation And recommend its acceptance: Allen Wier Mary E. Papke Jinx Watson Accepted for the Council: _____Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School The Theory Currently Known as M A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Tennessee, Knoxville Jessica Beth Weintraub May 2007 DEDICATION To my parents and my sister ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my dissertation committee, Dr. Jinx Watson, Dr. Mary Papke, Allen Wier, and most especially my Chair, Michael Knight. Because I wrote about so many subjects in which I was not formally trained, I relied heavily on the generosity of others’ knowledge and time. Thanks to Dr. Orla Dermody for her friendship and for the tour of Oak Ridge National Labs. All of the ORNL scientists I met went out of their ways to be helpful; I especially appreciate Dr. Rich Norby for his time and genuine excitement about my project. Maggie Giddens and her parents in Tullahoma connected me with Mrs. Jane Greer Puckett, an early pioneer for women in mathematics who worked in 9731 during the early days of ORNL. Mrs. Puckett graciously spoke to me on the phone. Thanks to Dr. Karl Iagnemma, Pam Houston, Gary Snyder, and Maria Melendez for inspiration about science and nature writing. Dr. Greg Pasternack originally told me about the young women working in Oak Ridge during WWII. Dax Cole introduced me to Dr. John Rehder, a UT professor and the author of Appalachian Folkways. Dancing Nia with Sara Ridner, Helen Morrow, Elizabeth Cole, Karen Nolt, Sarah Downey, and, in NYC, Kari Etter – as well as having my spirit administered to by the amazing Sara Griscom – has been and continues to be a gift. Meeting Trena Paulus and Joanna Stiebert, and through them, Dorothy Stulberg helped me to better understand the class and racial divides in early ORNL. I am fortunate to have many loving friends and family members who offered support throughout the process. For their outstandingly generous friendship and unrelenting writing encouragement, I want to thank Silvia Schultermandl, Leigh Morgan, Katherine Stephan, Heidi Miller, Sarah and Mike McCollum, and Diane Yentel. Thanks to Susanna Haddon for numerous trans-Atlantic phone calls and the magical concept of “beat the clock.” And overwhelming gratitude goes to my inspiring writer-friends, Kate Williams and Laura Hoffer. iii ABSTRACT The Theory Currently Known as M is a creative dissertation for an English doctoral degree. Recent works in contemporary literature explore connections between scientific theories and the human emotions: Venn diagrams, botanical entries, and mathematical equations are numerous in theatrical successes such as David Auburn’s Proof and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, collections of short stories such as Karl Iagnemma’s On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collectors, and Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever and Servants of the Map, and novels such as Charles Baxter’s First Light. Writers, always searching for fresh forms of phrasing, syntax, and metaphor, find fresh ways to describe love and desire, discord and estrangement by borrowing from science. Metaphors derived from scientific inquiries emerge as a way to specify the mysterious entity of “place” and dovetail with current critical and literary meditations on land and location. The role of gender and history in discussions of place cannot be ignored, especially if place is defined as Eudora Welty does in her treatise, Place in Fiction, and, more recently as Minrose Gwin describes it, as “space”: place as container and conduit, an impetus for all that fiction can do, acting alternatively and simultaneously as point of view, character, setting, history, and culture; a full-to-bursting vessel housing the narratives swirling within, under and above the land itself. The novel merges scientific language and Appalachian history, creating a helicoidal text. It contains two narratives, one that takes place in 2004, one that unfolds during WWII. Both storylines alternate between Knoxville and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The female narrator, Elizabeth works at the recently built Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2004, Conway is a failed scientist obsessed with his past and superstring theory. He is searching for a unifying theory of love and loss. iv PREFACE Before string theory, the most popular unified theory was an eleven-dimensional theory of supergravity – the ten dimensions of supersymmetry combined with gravity. Duality relations between superstring theories attempt to relate Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, equate large distance with small distance, and exchange strong coupling with weak coupling. Qubits or Quantum bits are fundamental units of information in a quantum computer, capable of existing in two states, 0 or 1, simultaneously or at a different time. Since it is suspected that all string theories are merely different limits of some more fundamental theory, then perhaps that more fundamental theory exists in eleven spacetime dimensions. “M theory,” a term coined by Dr. Ed Witten, is the unknown eleven-dimensional theory whose low energy limit is the supergravity theory in eleven dimensions. M theory can be used to label the unknown, although there is still much to discover about M theory itself. Judging from its perceived dimensional energy relationships, string theory must be a theory where distance scales, coupling strengths, and the number of dimensions in spacetime, are not fixed concepts but fluid entities that shift with our point of view. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction..................................................................................1 The Theory Currently Known as M: A Novel.......................................31 Sources ....................................................................................................348 Vita ..........................................................................................................352 vi CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 1. Critical Introduction and Overview This critical introduction will present an overview and discuss key influences that helped to shape my creative dissertation, a novel called The Theory Currently Known as M. With its two interwoven narratives, the novel is a kind of twinned text. One narrative should serve as a mirror to the other, and the answers to lingering questions in one story will be intimated in the other. Its interwoven shape derives from both string theory, which posits that the universe exists in eleven dimensions (what was originally conceived of as ten spacetime dimensions is now thought of by some theoretical physicists as a supergravity theory with eleven spacetime dimensions), as well as DNA’s double helix. Each narrative has eleven chapters, one for each of the dimensions. The novel’s title is lifted from Dr. Edward Witten, who coined the term “The Theory Currently Known as M” in order to unify the five competing string theories vying for prominence in the mid- 1990s. “M Theory” denotes a mysterious eleventh dimension that some physicists believe forms when the ten-dimension strings vibrate. Witten, when pushed, has admitted that “‘M’ stands for magic, mystery, or matrix, according to taste” (Greene 311). In writing this novel, I hope to give “a local habitation and a name” – as well as a narrative arc – to this branch of physics, an area of study that suffers from an aridity of narrative and an almost pathological placelessness. The novel pivots around both literal and theoretical inquiries of place, using the sciences as entries into the emotional landscape of narratives: specialized