More than 1,200 people jammed the American Museum of Natural History’s LeFrak Theater Wednesday night to hear a panel of cosmologists, astrophysicists and an astronomer try to arrive at a unified theory of everything – sometimes called String Theory – at the 6th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate.

The audience was a mixed group of teachers, students, science buffs, science-fiction fans, oddballs, museum members and sponsors, who had gathered to hear some of today’s thorniest scientific notions thrashed out.

The moderator and frequent “NOVA” host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, started things with a Big Bang, saying that in previous debates, panelists had almost come to blows. No fights broke out, however, as Andrei Linde of Stanford University laid out his theory of our universe as an inflatable bubble, illustrating it with a graphic of a squeezed, bulging balloon.

Next came Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, spinning an elegant theory of a “multiverse,” which he likened to a bubble bath in which each bubble is a separate universe. Harvard’s Lisa Randall, a particle physicist, launched her theory of extra dimensions, while Lawrence Krauss, of Case Western Reserve University, remarked that another dimension could be a mere millimeter away, and we don’t know it.

In the end, nothing was settled, but the debate will rage on. “It’s always a challenge to balance marginally convergent science views, and I think tonight worked,” Dr. Tyson said in conclusion, tying things up with a string. “They spoke with a candor and honesty you don’t often find on the frontiers of science.” And no fisticuffs, either.