Into the Impossible With Brian Keating cover image

Neil Turok: Most Theorists are WRONG! (#262)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

00:00

How to Make Sense of a String Theory Formula

Most of those calculations are done using what we call perturbation theory. The reason people went for string theory is that it's very hard to get rid of the infinities in gravity without adding extra ingredients like extra dimensions of space, and more particles like supersymmetry. But there's a physical mechanism which may of itself get rid of all those infinities. In fact this is more or less how string theory works. String theory is sort of toy model of gravity I would say. So we don't know that we have to add all this extra junk we don't knows that at all. That's an assumption based on an approximation of what we callperturbative theory.

Play episode from 46:41
Transcript

The AI-powered Podcast Player

Save insights by tapping your headphones, chat with episodes, discover the best highlights - and more!
App store bannerPlay store banner
Get the app