It was a very lonely time in many ways. When I tried to get graduate students interested, many of them would say well look, you may be right and you may be wrong. But if I work in super gravity, I'm not going to find a job.

What made the experience of the super gravity guys so galling was that their theory wasn't so very different from String Theory to begin with. In fact, the main disagreement between them was a point of detail, which to outsiders, could seem like nit-picking. It was about the number of dimensions in the universe. We normally think of ourselves as living in a three dimensional world. We can move in three ways, left or right, up or down and forwards and backwards. But physics like to adding extra dimensions. Einstein suggested time should be a fourth dimension. Then someone suggested a fifth special dimension and then a sixth. The numbers just kept growing. The extra dimensions were spaces in the universe which we could never perceive. Most were microscopically small, but scientists believed they were really there. String Theory had been convinced there were in total exactly ten dimensions.

And if you have a little oscillating string, it has to have enough room to oscillate properly, and when one works this out mathematically, you find it just got a very clear answer. It had to be in ten dimensional space.

Ten dimensions. Nine special dimensions and one time.

Super gravity those had been convinced there were exactly eleven dimensions.