The Benefits of Thinking Hard About String Theory

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I think that we've gotten some benefit from thinking so hard about string theory. On the other hand, I do think that it has had an effect on the physics community which is not entirely salutory. The one possible counter example there is holography itself. Holography can be thought of as spread out over the horizon of the black hole rather than scattered through the interior. So something non-local and lower dimensional. In arguably, the first person to put forward that idea was Gerard Atuf. He did it before Susskind did, but Suss Kind did in a way that was much clearer to the rest of the community and much more dramatic.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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