String Thing

I watched The Elegant Universe, a documentary about string theory, on PBS last night. (For the unenlightened, string theory is the latest attempt by physicists to explain, uh, everything, including gravity, electromagnetism, the weird compulsions that hold atoms together and--I suppose--why my socks disappear in the washing machine.) It's nearly incomprehensible to the mathematically challenged, like me. But it's still fun to think about, in a gee-whiz sort of way, as it involves eleven dimensions, parallel realities, a universe made of vibrating "strings" and other seemingly science-fictional notions. You can have some fun trying to imagine "other" dimensions at the show's website here. And if, like me, you're attracted to spirals and mandalas, you might also enjoy some of the graphic depictions of colliding sub-atomic particles here. Most of them look like colorful, abstract paintings.