The Dancing Torus

This wild picture, brought to you by the folks at the Cornell Theory Center and Cornell University physicist Brian Greene, is a representation of some grandiose physics as played out on a supercomputer. The image is part of an animation created to help explain how string theory may help unify all of theoretical physics. In a delightful animation, a hollow sphere transforms itself into a number of other shapes, including one shape -- a torus -- that breaks the rules of topology, a branch of geometry that studies the properties of shapes that can be smoothly transformed into one another. To learn more about this rule-breaking model, and to see this sucker really shake, you can go to Ithaca, New York. If you're patient, you might also learn some interesting facts about the relationship between black holes and particles.