Kiley was just a few months old when I started reading Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? aloud to her. “What we perceive as a point in three-dimensional space,” I cooed, “is actually a bundle of extra dimensions curled up on themselves. If these extra dimensions were curled up into little circles and were small enough, we would not, based on casual inspection, know they even existed!” The book was a demanding read. It educed the same confusion A Wrinkle In Time had many years earlier, when Mrs Whatsit announced that, by the way, there was such thing as a tesseract.

“You see,” Mrs Whatsit had said, “If a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs Who’s right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk if it had to walk straight across.”

Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.

“Now, you see,” Mrs Whatsit said, “It would be there without that long trip. That is how we travel.”

Without Mrs Whatsit guiding me through higher dimensions, I had to stop every few sentences to draw brackets around scientific language or to write in curlicues in the margins. By the end of the introduction I read that light could be wave-like and particle-like, but could not behave as both a wave and a particle at the same time. I read that there was no compelling theoretical reason why neutrinos had to be massless, a notion I committed to memory and used later that year on a high school field trip to Fermi Lab. “Why are neutrinos massless?” I asked, to which the responder raised an eyebrow and answered simply that there was no theoretical proof regarding the masslessness of neutrinos, why had I asked?

I read about the so-called lepton, the unstable muon, the heavier-but-still-unstable tauon, and a branch of mathematics called topology, that involved stretching and shrinking, but not breaking the form of a geometric object. By the time I entered the math program in college and was asked to prove that any discrete topological space was Regular, the number of string theories had begun to shrink. What had, all along, been thought of as differing theories, were turning out now to be different ways of looking at the same thing.