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"Walker Evans"
A more critical eye could have taken this wonderfully researched life of the photographer to another level.
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"A Short History of Rudeness"
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[08/06/99]

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After a key breakthrough four years ago, string theorists are crunching their way through workable problems, and closing in on a theory of quantum gravity -- the problem that Einstein spent the last decades of his life failing to solve.

The hunt is a slow one. In a way, it's been on for the better part of 300 years, since Sir Isaac Newton described how fast an apple drops toward a dozing physicist's head. Newton was more interested in the motions of the planets, but his mathematics applied as much to heavenly bodies as to falling fruit. (Incidentally, the calculus that he used was as far ahead of the general understanding of mathematics in his day as the math behind string theory is today.)

The public is on to the hunt as well. More than a thousand people turned out on a chilly and rainy German afternoon for a triple bill of string-theory presentations, overflowing the University of Potsdam's auditorium and filling five additional rooms with live video connections. The first people in line arrived three hours before the start of the lecture; there was security and press enough for a rock band. There were even some 300 people who didn't fit into any of the rooms and stood out on the lawn listening to the lecture on the loudspeakers, the world's first stringheads enjoying the quantum vibe.

The concepts these physicists work with daily -- from 11-dimensional descriptions of reality to quantum interactions in black holes -- stretch the imagination. The mathematics involved daunt even other physicists. The most important developments at Strings99 came in noncommunicative geometry, conformal field theories and nonsupersymmetric scenarios -- not exactly household phrases.

But as David Gross of the University of California at Santa Barbara said, "these are good times for string theory." Jobs are available, both for post-docs and on the tenure track. During the coffee breaks, some participants eye papers while others swap gossip on who's doing exciting work. The German Academic Exchange Service provided extra funding so that young and unestablished researchers could meet leading practitioners in person.

The field draws talent from around the world, and supports numerous research centers as well. The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the Albert Einstein Institute are the second European hosts in the 11-year series of strings conferences, and in 2001 the meeting will travel to Bombay, India. As the wife of one presenter noted, the physicists are basically regular scholars -- they just happen to be trying to show how the whole universe works.

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