Thanx to everyone for all the interesting questions in the previous thread. I apologize for not being able to answer every one of them. I just arrived at a workshop on Long Island, and I'm also feeling a bit under the weather. From what I've seen so far, I think I will do a post on what is perturbative string theory and what does it have to do with spacetime and gravity (maybe it will even lead into a post on what is background independence). Feel free to use this thread for more questions if you like.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The title of this post is a famous question (posed, for example, by Joe Polchinski) which is modeled after an even more famous question by Ken Wilson, "What is Quantum Field Theory?". I certainly can't answer the first question, but Wilson's question now does have a widely agreed upon answer (which…
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years'…
“This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn't make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery?
If the guy exists why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it?
And if he doesn't exist what's the meaning of all this?” -Calvin, via Bill Watterson
This is our last comments of the week for 2015, and …
"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity." -Rod Serling
It's been an action-packed week here on Starts With A Bang, and we've tackled a whole slew of topics you're unlikely to see anyplace else! The past week has…
Thanx to everyone for all the interesting questions in the previous thread. I apologize for not being able to answer every one of them.
You could have, if you'd limited yourself to one-word answers.
Are the questioners serious or are they just stringing you along?
How many landscape solutions have asympotically non-free low energy QFTs? (e.g., by having lots of fermions in the low energy limit).
I'm wondering whether a study of such might either yield some insights into how to rule out part of the landscape or else might yield insight into how non-asymptotically free QFTs might fit into an overall consistent theory.
Isn't a Kerr ring singularity basically a closed string?
I mean it spins in one direction only and is incredibly flat and thin (one dimensional). Its size is on the order of Planck's length, like a string. Its surface is wriggling quantum foam and a string vibrates. A closed string vibrates to represent nuclear particles and the higher the frequency the more mass the particle has. Since they are one dimensional, if a google strings were crushed onto each other by gravity, then they would still look like one closed string (or ring singularity). However, the frequency of the vibration would multiply and become infinitely high, thus representing a particle of incredible mass, like a singularity. We already know that gravity can implode a star into neutrons (and perhaps quarks), so why not even smaller basic structures? It just seems to me that string theorists might like to know that GR actually predicts strings.