Sorry for just butting in to your guys' conversation...

But as I understand it... in string theory, everything is a field. It's a highly symmetric field, for which the 19 or so parameters of matter that physicists deal with on a regular basis (mass, charge, spin, etc.) are the resultants of a single underlying field identity in hyperspace (10-dimensional hyperspace).

So as just as Maxwell would have said, "'Light' is just a manifestation of vibrating electromagnetic field"... so now physicists are saying that, "'Matter' is just a manifestation of vibrating superstring field"

Now in the 21st century, theoretical physicists are coming to a growing consensus that it appears that everything in the universe consists of different modes of vibration of single super-symmetric field (strings made of space itself as Alex said?). So the "electromagnetic equations of 21st century" is just another way of generalizing a field by coupling the constituants of matter to (a) field(s) in higher dimensions (as Maxwell did for magnetic and electric field without going to higher dimensions).