SUPERSTRING THEORY
An amazing thing to me has
always been the remarkable similarity I've seen between many ideas of Kabbalah
and concepts of modern mathematics and physics. For example, in mathematics,
Georg Cantor showed in the 1800s that some things are too big to be grasped
as a whole (e.g. the class of all sets is not a set), and Kurt Godel proved
in the early 1900s that not everything which is true can be proven (Godel's
Incompleteness Theorem). Hence, from these results we recognize the limitations
of logic and our inability to grasp the totality of all things. In the realm
of physics, we find truly remarkable correspondences between Kabbalah and
what is known as superstring theory. The latter postulates that the fundamental
building blocks of reality are vibrating "strings". These strings,
however, can only exist in a universe that has either 10 or 26 dimensions.
This is intriguing because the gematria of the
most sacred name of God (yod-hey-vav-hey) is 26, and Kabbalah tells us that
the universe was created through 10 utterances (the ten sephirot). Superstring
theory further postulates that there are two types of strings ---- strings
with a clockwise vibration that live in a 10-dimensional space and strings
with a counterclockwise vibration that live in a 26-dimensional space. Originally,
the universe was in perfect balance, perfect symmetry. However, something
dirupted this symmetry and shattered the structure of space and time (the
shevirat hakelim, shattering of the vessels).
This broken symmetry, this shattering of the vessels, is known in science
as the Big Bang, the primordial explosion that created our universe. The
disruption of symmetry also caused some of the dimensions to contract. To
visualize this, think of a dimension as a line extending forever in each
direction. Now bend the line until it makes a circle, and then shrink the
circle down to the subatomic level. This is what happened with the extra
dimensions. Some of them shrunk to a point where
we can no longer perceive them, and so our universe appears to us to have
only 4 dimensions, three spacial and one temporal. For the 10-dimensional
universe, 6 dimensions shrunk (compacted) in this manner. The four dimensions
of space-time plus the 6 compacted dimensions are suggestive of Kabbalah's
reconstituted universe of the five partzufim,
one of which is composed of 6 sephirot. Furthermore, after the shattering
of the vessels, the 26-dimensional universe was reconstituted into four
dimensions of space-time and twenty-two compacted dimensions. It is said
that the expansion of the universe is fueled by the energy released through
the compactification or shrinking of these extra dimensions. This is reminiscent
of the teaching in Kabbalah that the universe was created through the twenty-two
letters of the aleph-bet. All in all, it looks like a remarkable "string"
of coincidences!