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S. James Gates is a physicist, a theorist on the exotically named frontiers of super strings and super symmetry.

These are fields where science is trying to reconcile its own most baffling contradictions.

And whether you can fully comprehend string theory or not,

its basic assumptions stretch our imagination about the nature of the universe we inhabit.

James Gates brings this home with ideas and questions we can all chew on and be enriched by.

He lets us into the playful, creative, even spiritual act of naming in science.

He's working to evolve the cosmic language of mathematics,

much his poetry evolved alongside prose to tell the whole story of what we're made of and where we came from.

And he sees codes embedded in reality, something like the codes embedded in computer programs.

I remember watching the movies, the Matrix, and so the thought occurred to me.

Suppose there were physicists in this movie.

How would they figure out that they lived in the Matrix?

One way they might do that is to look for evidence of codes in the laws of their physics.

But you see, that's what had happened to me already.

Uncovering the codes for reality.

I'm Krista Tippett. This is On Being from APM American Public Media.

Sylvester James Gates, Jr. is a professor and director of the Center for String and Particle Theory

at the University of Maryland where he's a regions professor.

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