Physicist Brian Greene "strung" the Drue Heinz Lectures audience along last night at the Carnegie Music Hall with a rapid-fire discussion of what the universe, and perhaps all of us, were all about.

The author of such popular science books as "The Fabric of the Cosmos" was backed by swirling digital images on a screen behind him as he brought us up to date on the latest theory of time and space, the super string concept.

Conveniently, this assumption also solves the conflict between Einstein's views of a smoothly running universe and quantum mechanics, which peers into the smallest particles and sees a jittery jumble. It has something to do with how a drop of ink is diluted in a bottle of Aquafina.

He also tossed in the uncertainty principle for good measure.

It's big versus small, Greene explained, somehow combining ants, a rolled-up sheet of paper and green doughnuts wrapped in some of those hypothetical strings to assure us that while we moved through time and space, we'd still be able to see the NCAA basketball finals.