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FYISE is an occasional update from the Informal Science Education (ISE) program designed to disseminate information about selected projects from our portfolio. This issue highlights three projects related to applied ISE research: a conference exploring the theory and practice of informal STEM learning; a web site that makes widely available ISE research papers and evaluation studies; and a book from a conference about public understanding of scientific research that includes results from evaluation studies. These awards illustrate three different approaches for sharing the results of ISE research with practitioners in science museums, media outlets, community-based organizations, and many other settings.

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, "The Elegant Universe," a three-hour NOVA miniseries with Brian Greene, and winner of the 2004 Peabody award, explores one of the most ambitious and exciting theories ever proposed -- one that may be the long-sought "theory of everything," which eluded even Einstein.  String theory, also known as superstring theory, proposes that the fundamental ingredients of nature are inconceivably tiny strings of energy, whose different modes of vibration underlie everything that happens in the universe. The theory successfully unites the laws of the large -- general relativity -- and the laws of the small -- quantum mechanics -- breaking a conceptual logjam that has frustrated scientists for nearly a century.

Program One, "The Elegant Universe: Einstein's Dream," introduces string theory and shows how modern physics -- being composed of two theories that are ferociously incompatible -- reached its schizophrenic impasse: one theory, known as general relativity, is fantastically successful in describing big things like stars and galaxies, and another, called quantum mechanics, is equally successful in describing small things like atoms and subatomic particles.

Program Two, "The Elegant Universe: String's the Thing," opens with a whimsical scene in a movie theater in which the history of the universe is run backwards to the big bang, the moment at which general relativity and quantum mechanics both come into play, and therefore the point at which our conventional model of reality breaks down.

Program Three, "The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th Dimension," shows how in 1995 Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, aided by others, revolutionized string theory by successfully uniting the five different versions into a single theory that is cryptically named "M-theory," a development which required a total of eleven dimensions.

Additionally, all three hours of "The Elegant Universe" are available to watch online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

ESI-0000610, PI - Peter S. McGhee, WGBH Educational Foundation