The analogy given here follows closely the one used by Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe, p. 107ff.

The description of string theory that I give draws heavily on Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

In a recent work "Three Theories" was inspired by Brian Greene's popular science book The Elegant Universe.

New concepts are introduced, including the Planck length and the Planck time, and ideas from The Elegant Universe are revisited.

Favorite Non-Fiction Book Read: The Elegant Universe, The Last American Man, Stiff.

Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage (2000).

Additional visuals come from NOVA's The Elegant Universe, Stephen Hawking's Universe, and Cosmos, among others.

Pretty accessible, if you have good calculus and matrix algebra - Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles A good popularization - Greene, The Elegant Universe.

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999), (See chapter 13)

Greene, Brian, "Elementary particles", The Elegant Universe, NOVA (PBS)