About 600 international scientists gathered here Monday to discuss "string theory", with which they hope to explain every physical phenomenon in the world.

At the inaugural of the International Conference on String Theory 2006, Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, a Harvard mathematics professor and Fields Medalist, said the international academic community had been working on interactions between mathematics and physics for the past ten years.

Like a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching under tension across the guitar, the elementary particles in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings.

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