Following Boardman-Vogt, McDuff, Segal, and others, we construct a monoidal topological groupoid or space of finite subsets of the plane, and interpret the Burau representation of knot theory as a topological quantum field theory defined on it. Its determinant or writhe is an invertible braided monoidal TQFT which group completes to define a Hopkins-Mahowald model for integral homology as an
E
2
E_2
Thom spectrum. We use these ideas to construct an infinite cyclic (Alexander) cover for the space of finite subsets of
C
\mathbb {C}
, and we argue that the TQFT defined by Burau is closely related to the SU(2)-valued Wess-Zumino-Witten model for string theory on
R
+
3
\mathbb {R}^3_+
.