Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tens ion across the

guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tensi on is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. Thes e musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension. In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in pa rticle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation mod es of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tensi on in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floatin g in spacetime, they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tensio n. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), wh ere a' is pronounced "alpha prime" and is equal to the square of the string leng th scale. If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called th e Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a bil lionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Unfortunately, this means that strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics te chnology (or financing!!) and so string theorists must devise more clever method s to test the theory than just looking for little strings in particle experiment s. String theories are classified according to whether or not the strings are requi red to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermio ns. In order to include fermions in string theory, there must be a special kind of symmetry called supersymmetry, which means for every boson (particle that tra nsmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up matter) . So supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles t hat make up matter. Supersymmetric partners to to currently known particles have not been observed i n particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric par ticles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators. Particle accelera tors could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy supersymmetry in the next decade. Evidence for supersymmetry at high energy would be compelling e vidence that string theory was a good mathematical model for Nature at the small est distance scales.