Is String Theory the Final Capstone?

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These days, most of the people in the field are more on the geometry side than the particle physics side. The questions that are involving our minds do have a lot to do with gravity as gravity, less so with particle physics as particle physics. Yeah. Absolutely. And I get the impression as someone who is string theory positive, but not involved with it myself, that these days,most of the people were mostly trying to understand unification. That was what got them excited. There was a less of a reaction from the general relativity community where most had been working on the problem of quantum gravity.

Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it’s only inspiration, not detailed guidance. So it’s easy to “do research on quantum gravity” and get lost in a world of toy models and mathematical abstraction. Today’s guest, Andrew Strominger, is a leading researcher in string theory and quantum gravity, and one who has always kept his eyes on the prize: connecting to the real world. We talk about the development of string theory, the puzzle of a positive cosmological constant, and how black holes and string theory can teach us about each other.

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Andrew Strominger received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Among his awards are the Dirac Medal, the Klein Medal, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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