“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammad, Mohammad will go to the mountain.” If you can’t make a String Theory of hadrons because the theory persists in behaving like gravity, then let gravity be described by String Theory. Why not use it to describe everything: gravity, electromagnetic forces, quarks, and all the rest? Problems two and three from the last chapter are gone; the predicted range of forces now fits the reality, and everything is made of strings. The inflexibility of the theory becomes an asset. A radically new vision of the world made up of one-dimensional threads of energy, fluctuating wildly out to the edges of the universe, would replace an older vision of matter made of point particles. To give you a picture of what this transformation of String Theory meant, let’s talk about size scales. Hadrons have a size somewhere between 10–13 and 10–14 centimeters. There is some variation, but mesons, baryons, and glueballs are all in this range. While 10–13 centimeters may seem terribly small, 100,000 times smaller than an atom, by the standards of modern particle physics, it’s very large.
