1 Strings as Things

At the heart of string theory lies a metaphor that has, over time, hardened into an ontology: the string. Textbooks and popular accounts alike speak of one-dimensional filaments vibrating in hidden dimensions, the ultimate building blocks of matter. But this image is a mirage produced by language.

The “string” is not a literal thread. It is a mathematical construct — a formalism of vibration modes, a way of encoding symmetries and spectra. To speak of “strings” as if they were physical wires weaving the fabric of reality is to mistake the representational scaffold for the thing represented.

This is a familiar pattern: once a metaphor works well enough to organise thinking, it gains a false solidity. “Strings” slip from heuristic to entity, and suddenly we imagine a cosmos built from minuscule violin strings humming in the void. But relationally, nothing of the sort is present. What exists are symbolic architectures: models that constrain how potentials can be cut into phenomena.

The danger is not only conceptual confusion. Reifying strings encourages a search for “the substance” of reality at a finer scale, as though ontology were a set of Russian dolls to be opened one after another. From a relational perspective, this is precisely backward. The “string” is a way of coordinating symbolic domains, not the final stratum of being.

In short: strings are things only in the grammar of physics discourse, not in the cosmos. To see them as such is to mistake metaphor for ontology, and to misrecognise the constructive act of theory itself.