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THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, Brian Greene, 1999, 2003
```(annotated and with added bold highlights by Epsilon=One)
```(annotated and with added bold highlights by Epsilon=One)
Chapter 13 - Black Holes: A String/M-Theory Perspective
A Flurry of E-Mail
The next morning I received an e-mail from Strominger asking me for any comments or reactions to his paper. He mentioned that "it should tie in somehow with your work with Aspinwall and Morrison," because, as it turned out, he too had been exploring a possible connection to the phenomenon of topology change. I immediately sent him an e-mail describing the rough outline Morrison and I had come up with. When he responded, it was clear that his level of excitement matched what Morrison and I had been riding since the preceding day.
During the next few days a continuous stream of e-mail messages circulated between the three of us as we sought feverishly to put quantitative rigor behind our idea of drastic space-tearing topology change. Slowly but surely, all the details fell into place. By the following Wednesday, a week after Strominger posted his initial insight, we had a draft of a joint paper spelling out the dramatic new transformation of the spatial fabric that can follow the collapse of a three-dimensional sphere.
Strominger was scheduled to give a seminar at Harvard the next day, and so left Santa Barbara in the early morning. We agreed that Morrison and I would continue to fine-tune the paper and then submit it to the electronic archive that evening. By 11:45 P.M., we had checked and rechecked our calculations and everything seemed to hang together perfectly. And so, we electronically submitted our paper and headed out of the physics building. As Morrison and I walked toward my car (I was going to drive him to the house he had rented for the term) our discussion turned to one of devil's advocacy, in which we imagined the harshest criticisms that someone determined not to accept our results might level. As we drove out of the parking lot and left the campus, we realized that although our arguments were strong and convincing, they were not thoroughly airtight. Neither of us felt that there was any real chance that our work was wrong, but we did recognize that the strength of our claims and the particular wording we had chosen at a few points in the paper might leave the ideas open to rancorous debate, potentially obscuring the importance of the results. We agreed that it might have been better had we written the paper in a somewhat lower key, underplaying the depth of the claims, and allowing the physics community to judge the paper on its merits, rather than possibly reacting to the form of its presentation.
As we drove on, Morrison reminded me that under the rules of the electronic archive we could revise our paper until 2 A.M., when it would then be released for public Internet access. I immediately turned the car around and we drove back to the physics building, retrieved our initial submission, and set to work on toning down the prose. Thankfully, it was quite easy to do. A few word changes in critical paragraphs softened the edge of our claims without compromising the technical content. Within an hour, we resubmitted the paper, and agreed not to talk about it at all during the drive to Morrison's house.
By early the next afternoon it was evident that the response to our paper was enthusiastic. Among the many e-mail responses was one from Plesser, who gave us one of the highest compliments one physicist can give another by declaring, "I wish that I had thought of that!" Notwithstanding our fears the previous night, we had convinced the string theory community that not only can the fabric of space undergo the mild tears discovered earlier (Chapter 11), but that far more drastic rips, roughly illustrated by Figure 13.3, can occur as well.
During the next few days a continuous stream of e-mail messages circulated between the three of us as we sought feverishly to put quantitative rigor behind our idea of drastic space-tearing topology change. Slowly but surely, all the details fell into place. By the following Wednesday, a week after Strominger posted his initial insight, we had a draft of a joint paper spelling out the dramatic new transformation of the spatial fabric that can follow the collapse of a three-dimensional sphere.
Strominger was scheduled to give a seminar at Harvard the next day, and so left Santa Barbara in the early morning. We agreed that Morrison and I would continue to fine-tune the paper and then submit it to the electronic archive that evening. By 11:45 P.M., we had checked and rechecked our calculations and everything seemed to hang together perfectly. And so, we electronically submitted our paper and headed out of the physics building. As Morrison and I walked toward my car (I was going to drive him to the house he had rented for the term) our discussion turned to one of devil's advocacy, in which we imagined the harshest criticisms that someone determined not to accept our results might level. As we drove out of the parking lot and left the campus, we realized that although our arguments were strong and convincing, they were not thoroughly airtight. Neither of us felt that there was any real chance that our work was wrong, but we did recognize that the strength of our claims and the particular wording we had chosen at a few points in the paper might leave the ideas open to rancorous debate, potentially obscuring the importance of the results. We agreed that it might have been better had we written the paper in a somewhat lower key, underplaying the depth of the claims, and allowing the physics community to judge the paper on its merits, rather than possibly reacting to the form of its presentation.
As we drove on, Morrison reminded me that under the rules of the electronic archive we could revise our paper until 2 A.M., when it would then be released for public Internet access. I immediately turned the car around and we drove back to the physics building, retrieved our initial submission, and set to work on toning down the prose. Thankfully, it was quite easy to do. A few word changes in critical paragraphs softened the edge of our claims without compromising the technical content. Within an hour, we resubmitted the paper, and agreed not to talk about it at all during the drive to Morrison's house.
By early the next afternoon it was evident that the response to our paper was enthusiastic. Among the many e-mail responses was one from Plesser, who gave us one of the highest compliments one physicist can give another by declaring, "I wish that I had thought of that!" Notwithstanding our fears the previous night, we had convinced the string theory community that not only can the fabric of space undergo the mild tears discovered earlier (Chapter 11), but that far more drastic rips, roughly illustrated by Figure 13.3, can occur as well.