Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University, and even on popular television shows. String theory has been celebrated and explained in best-selling books like "The Elegant Universe," by Dr. Physicists and mathematicians conversant in strings are courted and recruited like star quarterbacks by universities eager to establish their research credentials. In the last 20 years, string theory has become a major branch of physics. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature - the proverbial "theory of everything" that could be written on a T-shirt.Īnd so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything.