Chiropteral Mirror Symmetry?

Spurred by the previous post showing M-theory’s possible relation to matters Chiropteral , Joe Polchinski (who I think, in 1995 or 1996, first drew the diagram that I messed with in that post) emailed me* to say that there is a quite striking appearance of batman-ology in the string theory literature. It’s from one of the classic Mirror Symmetry papers of 1990 by Candelas, De La Ossa, Green, and Parkes, “An Exactly soluble superconformal theory from a mirror pair of Calabi-Yau manifolds.” (you can find it via here). Here it is:

batman ish mirror symmetry diagram

What is this? It has to do with spaces in string theory called “Calabi-Yau manifolds”, which are important (in some approaches) as starting points for constructing models […] Click to continue reading this post