Excerpt from The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Because energy density is, like matter, a source of gravity, this infinite energy density ought to mean there is enough gravitational attraction in the universe to curl spacetime into a single point, which obviously hasn't happened.

One might hope to solve the problem of this seeming contradiction between observation and theory by saying that the ground state fluctuations have no gravitational effect, but this would not work. One can detect the energy of ground state fluctuations by the Casimir effect. If you place a pair of metal plates parallel to each other and close together, the effect of the plates is to reduce slightly the number of wavelengths that fit between the plates relative to the number outside. This means that the energy density of ground state fluctuations between the plates, although still infinite, is less than the energy density outside by a finite amount. This difference in energy density gives rise to a force pulling the plates together, and this force has been observed experimentally.

Forces are a source of gravity in general relativity, just as matter is, so it would not be consistent to ignore the gravitational effect of this energy difference.

Another possible solution to the problem might be to suppose there was a cosmological constant such as Einstein introduced in an attempt to have a static model of the universe. If this constant had an infinite negative value, it could exactly cancel the infinite positive value of the ground state energies in free space, but this cosmological constant seems very ad hoc, and it would have to be tuned to extraordinary accuracy.

Fortunately, a totally new kind of symmetry was discovered in the 1970s that provides a natural physical mechanism to cancel the infinities arising from ground state fluctuations.

Supersymmetry is a feature of our modern mathematical models that can be described in various ways. One way is to say that spacetime has extra dimensions besides the dimensions we experience. These are called Grassmann dimensions, because they are measured in numbers known as Grassmann variables rather than in ordinary real numbers. Ordinary numbers commute; that is, it does not matter in which order you multiply them: 6 times 4 is the same as 4 times 6. But Grassmann variables anticommute: x times y is the same as –y times x.

Supersymmetry was first considered for removing infinities in matter fields and Yang-Mills fields in a spacetime where both the ordinary number dimensions and the Grassmann dimensions were flat, not curved. But it was natural to extend it to ordinary numbers and Grassmann dimensions that were curved. This led to a number of theories called supergravity, with different amounts of supersymmetry. One consequence of supersymmetry is that every field or particle should have a "superpartner" with a spin that is either 1/2 greater than its own or 1/2 less.

The ground state energies of bosons, fields whose spin is a whole number (0, 1, 2 , etc.), are positive. On the other hand, the ground state energies of fermions, fields whose spin is a half number (1/2, 3/2 , etc.), are negative. Because there are equal numbers of bosons and fermions, the biggest infinities cancel in supergravity theories.

There remained the possibility that there might be smaller but still infinite quantities left over. No one had the patience needed to calculate whether these theories were actually completely finite. It was reckoned it would take a good student two hundred years, and how would you know he hadn't made a mistake on the second page? Still, up to 1985, most people believed that most supersymmetric supergravity theories would be free of infinities.
Then suddenly the fashion changed. People declared there was no reason not to expect infinities in supergravity theories, and this was taken to mean they were fatally flawed as theories. Instead, it was claimed that a theory named supersymmetric string theory was the only way to combine gravity with quantum theory. Strings, like their namesakes in everyday experience, are one-dimensional extended objects. They have only length. Strings in string theory move through a background spacetime. Ripples on the string are interpreted as particles.

Excerpted from The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking Copyright 2001 by Stephen Hawking. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.