Zvi Bern's epiphany came in October 2005 when he read in the newspaper about that year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren took the honors for discovering that peptic ulcers are caused not by stress or diet but by a bacterium. When skeptics scoffed at the idea, Marshall gave himself the bugand an ulcerand cured himself with antibiotics. From the tale, "it was clear that in science the big money is in overturning the accepted beliefs," says Bern, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. So he decided to return to a project that might upend a pillar of physics lore: the belief that standard quantum theory and gravity don't mix.
