Superstrings is a lecture that celebrates Einstein Year by linking Einstein's favourite instrument, the violin, with many of the concepts of modern physics that he did so much to found. “Superstrings”toured Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing and Guangzhou during the China Science Week from 19-24 May 2006.

The performance began with an introduction to Einstein's life and involvement with music and how his ideas have shaped our concepts of space, time and the evolution of the Universe. These slides were accompanied by selections from J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, some of Einstein's favourite music.

The lecture then proceeded with a discussion of some of our modern ideas that build on the structures of Einstein and define the so-called "Standard Model" of particle physics, in which the evolution of the Universe after the Big Bang can be understood by the interplay of a small number of fundamental forces on a few featureless "elementary" particles, the quarks and leptons, and their antimatter equivalents.

Also at several points in the lecture, more of Einstein's favourite solo violin music were played. Modern ideas of Superstrings may well lead to a much more satisfactory theory, although at the cost of prediciting a whole host of new particles as yet undiscovered. Superstring theory also predicts that the universe has extra "hidden" dimensions of space whose size is so small that they are invisible to our everyday experience. Nevertheless, they may give rise to measureable effects in the next generations of "atom smashers" due to start operation at CERN in Geneva in a couple of years time. The lecture ended by looking at these possible effects and with a duet for two violins in which lecturer and soloist join forces to illustrate the production of mini Black Holes in the unimaginably violent collisions at CERN.