Robert Myers, "Adventures With Superstrings," Saturday 8:00 p.m., is one of the leading theoretical physicists working in the area of string theory in Canada. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1986, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He moved to McGill University in 1989, where he was a Professor of Physics until moving to the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in the summer of 2001.

Professor Myers is the 2005 winner of Canada's top prize in theoretical and mathematical physics, which is awarded by the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques. He was awarded the Herzberg Medal in 1999 by the Canadian Association of Physicists, for seminal contributions to our understanding of black hole microphysics and D-branes. He is one of only two people to have won the first award in Gravity Research Foundation Essay Contest twice (1997,1995). This contest was established for the purpose of stimulating thought and encouraging work on gravitation, and past winners in the fifty-year history of this contest include Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.

Physics has emerged from the twentieth century with two remarkably successful descriptions of nature, which stand in striking contrast. Quantum mechanics describes the subatomic realm with intrinsic uncertainties and probabilities. On the other hand, Einstein's general relativity describes gravitational phenomena in an exacting geometric arena. Theoretical physicists have struggled for over fifty years trying to combine these views in a single unified framework. More recently, superstring theory has drawn a huge amount of interest as a leading contender to provide such a unification. It has even entered the popular culture as the "ultimate theory of everything". Superstring theory is a theory of strings, branes, extra space-time dimensions and much more.

In this presentation, Robert will try to give a flavour for what superstring theory is all about and why physicists, like him, continue to be so excited about this -- perhaps the final theory. In particular, if time permits, he will touch on the idea of cosmic superstrings, possible stringy relics from the early universe. These objects could provide a spectacular window into the microphysics of string theory through astronomical observations.