Andrew Strominger

In the popular view, scientists ply their trade in sterile labs surrounded by delicate glassware and elegant equipment, where they ask polite questions of Nature and follow equations to their logical conclusions. The image that comes to mind isn't exactly "Braveheart." Yet among the many scientists who push the limits of knowledge every day, there are those who go even further--challenging long-held theories and attacking hard problems that ultimately may not have solutions.

It's a question as old as Plato: Do scientists discover laws of nature, or create them? Did Einstein discover relativity, or did he think it up? Do mathematicians invent theorems and proofs, or are these truths out there waiting to be discovered? Do chemists find new molecules, or forge them? Sometimes, the answer is obvious. Astronomers didn't create the stars, and physicists didn't invent gravity. Something out there shines; objects fall.

It's a question as old as Plato: Do scientists discover laws of nature, or create them? Did Einstein discover relativity, or did he think it up? Do mathematicians invent theorems and proofs, or are these truths out there waiting to be discovered? Do chemists find new molecules, or forge them? Sometimes, the answer is obvious. Astronomers didn't create the stars, and physicists didn't invent gravity. Something out there shines; objects fall.

In the popular view, scientists ply their trade in sterile labs surrounded by delicate glassware and elegant equipment, where they ask polite questions of Nature and follow equations to their logical conclusions. The image that comes to mind isn't exactly "Braveheart." Yet among the many scientists who push the limits of knowledge every day, there are those who go even further--challenging long-held theories and attacking hard problems that ultimately may not have solutions.

Theoretical physics is perhaps the most abstruse field in science. Its most rarefied subfield is called string theory, a mathematical framework based on the notion that matter is made not of individual particles but rather of tiny, vibrating string-like loops. The scientists now constructing string theories, like Columbia University professor Brian Greene, are clearly more capable of abstraction than most of us; by age 5, Greene was multiplying 30-digit numbers.

The Nature Conservancy, as part of its statewide Habit Restoration Project, will begin work in the Prado Basin, an area of rich habitat along the Santa Ana River, less than an hour's drive from downtown Los Angeles. The basin covers approximately 14,000 acres and is home to a number of rare and endangered bird species, including the least Bell's vireo, the southwestern willow flycatcher and burrowing owls.

The appeal of string theory among physicists is particularly astonishing in light of the fact that no one knows, as yet, exactly what 'it' is. It doesn't even have a proper name: The latest, most powerful, incarnation is cryptically called "M" theory--where M can stand for Magic, Mother, Mystery, Matrix or Membrane. So why do physicists take it seriously? What makes it science rather than superstition or idle philosophizing akin to figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

A physicist from UC Santa Barbara has taken what scientists are calling a major step toward finding a long-sought unified theory of nature. If it works, such a theory would explain everything from subatomic particles to supernovas as different aspects of the same fundamental stuff. "It's a major development," said Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. "It's had a very dramatic impact."

Over the past five years, some physicists have increasingly embraced "string theories" that appear to defy common sense: Among other seeming absurdities, these theories would expand the universe into 11 dimensions and perhaps even dispense with space and time. What, one might ask, has led physicists to brazenly embrace such a bizarre scenario? Revolutions do not come lightly in physical law, and space and time will not go gently into the night.

String theory--the notion that everything in the universe is woven in a tapestry of 11 dimensional vibrating strings--has seduced an increasing number of physicists over the past 20 years with its sheer mathematical beauty and power to solve difficult problems. At the same time, skeptics have found it easy to dismiss these successes as so much theoretical smoke. After all, critics argue, the vibrating strings and unseen dimensions that hold them are too tiny ever to be seen in experiments.

Ever since early astronomers yanked Earth from center stage in the solar system some 500 years ago, scientists have been pulling the rug out from under people's basic beliefs. "The history of physics," says Harvard physicist Andrew Strominger, "is the history of giving up cherished ideas." No idea has been harder to give up, however--for physicists and laypeople alike--than everyday notions of space and time, the fundamental "where" and "when" of the universe and everything in it.