Duality
It is one of the stranger ideas to emerge from recent physics. Take two theories that describe utterly dissimilar worlds — worlds with different numbers of dimensions, different geometries of spacetime, different building blocks of matter. Twenty years ago, we'd say those are indisputably disparate and mutually exclusive worlds. Today, there's another option: two radically different theories might be dual to one another — that is, they might be two very different manifestations of the same underlying reality.
Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them. When physicists looking to unite quantum theory with gravity found themselves with five very different but equally plausible string theories, it was an embarrassment of riches — everyone was hoping for one "theory of everything", not five. But duality proved to be the key ingredient. Remarkably, all five string theories turned out to be dual to one another, different expressions of a single underlying theory.
Perhaps the most radical incarnation of duality was discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena. Maldacena found that a version of string theory in a bizarrely shaped universe with five large dimensions is mathematically dual to an ordinary quantum theory of particles living on that universe's four-dimensional boundary. Previously, one could argue that the world was made up of particles or that the world was made up of strings. Duality transformed or into and — mutually exclusive hypotheses, both equally true.
In everyday language, duality means something very different. It is used to connote a stark dichotomy: male and female, east and west, light and darkness. Embracing the physicist's meaning of duality, however, can provide us with a powerful new metaphor, a one-stop shorthand for the idea that two very different things might be equally true. As our cultural discourse is becoming increasingly polarized, the notion of duality is both more foreign and more necessary than ever. If accessible in our daily cognitive toolkit, it could serve as a potent antidote to our typically Boolean, two-valued, zero-sum thinking — where statements are either true or false, answers are yes or no, and if I'm right, then you are wrong. With duality, there's a third option. Perhaps my argument is right and yours is wrong; perhaps your argument is right and mine is wrong; or, just maybe, our opposing arguments are dual to one another.
That's not to say that we ought to descend into some kind of relativism, or that there are no singular truths. It is to say, though, that truth is far more subtle than we once believed, and that it shows up in many guises. It is up to us to recognize it in all its varied forms.
