Joe Polchinski, who won the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for transformative advances in quantum field theory, string theory and quantum gravity,” can’t sit still.

“I am fidgety,” he told Quanta in an email. “I will calculate in my chair for a while, then switch to the blackboard, then go for a walk inside the building.” Then he’ll find somewhere quiet to sit among the “many excellent spaces” at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has worked for 25 years. Then, he said, “perhaps a walk along the cliffs over the ocean.”

Polchinski literally wrote the book on string theory (he authored the seminal 1998 textbook String Theory). The “second superstring revolution” of the mid- to late 1990s resulted in part from an epiphany he had in October 1995. “I think it happened in my office or — possibly — on the way to the men’s room,” he said.

The sudden realization concerned D-branes — certain one-dimensional strings, two-dimensional membranes and higher-dimensional objects that, according to his work, undulate in 10 space-time dimensions and help shape the universe’s properties. “The key feature about D-branes is that they carry a certain charge that nothing else carries; this followed from a combination of two papers I had written several years earlier,” Polchinski explained. The discovery meant that D-branes were essential components of string theory, predicted by the mathematical dualities that tie different versions of the theory together. D-branes added a rich new mathematical structure to the theory and allowed researchers to construct cosmological models that treated the three-dimensional fabric of the universe as a giant D-brane.