It's Hard To Teach Passionately

Nature's Patterns Sometimes Reflect Two Intertwined Features: Fundamental Physical Laws And Environmental Influences. It's Nature's Version Of Nature Versus Nurture.

I'd Say Many Features Of String Theory Don't Mesh With What We Observe In Everyday Life.

Supersymmetry Is A Theory Which Stipulates That For Every Known Particle There Should Be A Partner Particle. For Instance, The Electron Should Be Paired With A Supersymmetric 'selectron,' Quarks Ought To Have 'squark' Partners, And So On.

Black Holes Provide Theoreticians With An Important Theoretical Laboratory To Test Ideas. Conditions Within A Black Hole Are So Extreme, That By Analyzing Aspects Of Black Holes We See Space And Time In An Exotic Environment, One That Has Shed Important, And Sometimes Perplexing, New Light On Their Fundamental Nature.

That Is, You Can Have Nothingness, Absolute Nothingness For Maybe A Tiny Fraction Of A Second, If A Second Can Be Defined In That Arena, But Then It Falls Apart Into A Something And An Anti-something. And That Something Is Then What We Call The Universe. But Can We Really Understand That Or Put Rigorous Mathematics Or Testable Experiments Against That? Not Yet. So One Of The Big Holy Grail Of Physics Is To Understand Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.