The Light Code for Relationships

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I didn't like the main hypothesis of string theory that particles were are in fact little strings. And I remember saying to, uh, Mike, but isn't it just really ugly? He got these kind of stars in his eyes and went on something which I saw a lot about later, you know, about how beautiful it was. It's one of those things that you really, um, now of course we have far more elegant. They had the most clumsy possible way of describing it and presenting it. Brute force kind of. But it's just it brute force.

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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