Adam Rea of Batavia organized the workday for his Eagle Scout project. Fellow Scout Kevin Millen was working near a burial site, probing the ground, when he found a fallen headstone, hidden beneath mulch. "It was really cool," Millen said. "It's not every day you get to find a new grave."

During the next week, Geoff Eargle and Katie Kosirog, ES&H, and Bob Lootens, Roads & Grounds, pieced together the inscription. They found "Joel Howe, Age 69" but were unable to make out all of the stone. Searching for clues, they examined a nearby grave, weathered to near illegibility. Eargle poured water over the stone. The sheen cleared some of the letters: "Noah Sabinah: Son of Joel S. and Sally Howe." Joel Howe's grave is part of a family plot; he is buried next to his son.

Rea has designed and built a new "Pioneer Cemetery" sign, which includes a directory of the gravesites. Fermilab's cemetery records, last drawn up in 1967, will be updated to include all known graves and epitaphs.

Rea's project attracted the attention of John Heider, a graveyard enthusiast from Monticello, Ill. who drove to Fermilab to aid the group with materials and expertise. He commented, "Locating all the unmarked graves in the cemetery might be compared to what Fermilab does. We know something is there, we look for it, find it, and then becomes part of our daily lives. On Saturday we found pioneers who, 150 years ago, walked on and worked this earth. Fermi is definitely a place of discovery."
--D.A. Venton
Readers with more information about the Howe family can write to us at today@fnal.gov.

In string theory -- an idea that's been around since the late 1970s -- the universe is a 10-dimensional place, with six of those dimensions curled up inside themselves like a cat in front of a fireplace. All particles and forces are different resonances and vibrations of these 10-dimensional strings.

Strings are far from the only game in town. There are other, potentially equally promising approaches to unifying physics' two seemingly incompatible visions of the cosmos: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

This fall, Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit has published a critique of string theory (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory), pointing out that in more than three decades, string theory still has yet to make a single prediction that can be verified in the lab or through the lens of a telescope. If all scientific disciplines maintained such fluffy and forgiving standards, Woit argues, science would devolve into little more than medieval disputations about angels and heads of pins.
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