![]() I think most of them recalibrated their expectation about the theory. Are HEP theorists convinced string theory is the theory of everything? Well I'm not one, but I don't think so. I think there is some degree of disillusion among the HEP theory community about string theory. This one is from 1992 ĭepends what you mean. It is just that his papers did a lot to kick start the field. It's all interviews with important physicists and mathematicians.Įdit: These ideas are actually older than Witten's work. A good source for information on the scattering amplitudes program and the current view of string theory is the podcast "The Universe Speaks in Numbers". I would also suggest finding videos of Nima talking about it. Here is a solid, readable article on the amplituhedron. If it pans out, it could redefine how we view fundamental physics, but we can't know how successful it will be yet. On the other hand you have things like Nima's Amplituhedron, which in my opinion is the most ambitious and exciting topic in mathematical physics right now. The QCD calculations relevant to the LHC are too complicated to do with traditional methods, so we pretty much needed new methods, and they came from this line of research. This field has been fruitful for both practical phenomenology, and for cutting edge speculative stuff. Nowadays people doing this don't really even think about strings, but they use twistors, and this connection came from string theory. He showed that you could do some incredibly difficult Quantum Field Theory calculations with tools from twistor string theory (a model that people generally don't think describes the real world). This whole area was pretty much started due to some work by Ed Witten (arguably the greatest mathematical physicist and string theorist of all time) in 2003-2004. The most notable researcher is probably Nima Arkani-Hamed, but Ruth Britto and Lance Dixon come to mind as well. I haven't seen Amplitudes mentioned yet: There is a research program that I think is very cool, often referred to simply as "Scattering Amplitudes". My understanding is that string theorists generally think that strings will emerge in the bulk theories, but for now are getting a lot of (non-perturbative!) insight from these boundary theories. Another recent source of excitement is the SYK model. As an example, consider the recent Harlow-Ooguri papers. Much of this research comes from holography, where one can make predictions about a gravitational theory from a theory without gravity in lower dimensions. Someone else here linked an Andy Strominger video, and the one time I had a conversation with him (just a few years before that video) he actually tried to stress that he was thinking more about quantum gravity in general than string theory specifically. I get the sense that most "string theorists" aren't working on string theory proper right now, but rather quantum gravity from many general perspectives (though many believe that quantum gravity is intimately connected to string theory).
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