Every passionate scientist has a mystery at the center of his or her research. In exactly the ancient senses of mystery and passion, there are questions or sets of questions that can never be solved, only wrestled with, embraced, and, one hopes, transformed. The primacy of work is just such a mystery in the work of Anselm Strauss, and his profoundly fertile transformations have given rise to a new way of framing an old sociological/philosophical question: the relationship between the empirical/material on the one hand, and the theoretical/abstract on the other. Here I call this the relationship between the visible and the invisible.