Perimeter's Threefold Way
Charles Seife · Science · 2003
Research at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics focuses on three main fields. String theory—the most familiar and perhaps most baffling to laypeople—seeks to fill a gap in particle physics. The ordinary Standard Model treats fundamental particles, such as electrons or quarks, as points in space, without breadth, depth, or length. Unfortunately, that simplistic assumption gums up the mathematical machinery of the Standard Model and of quantum mechanics. Worse still, current subatomic theories don't account for gravity as they do for the other forces: the strong, the weak, and the electromagnetic force.