There have been several recent interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara as part of their program this semester on Mathematical Structures in String Theory. Last week Greg Moore gave a beautiful talk on Mathematical Aspects of Fluxes. It’s a sad commentary on the state of the field that he felt it necessary to begin his talk by apologizing that the work he was describing didn’t seem to have anything useful to say about the Landscape.
This week Graeme Segal spoke about On the Locality of the Statespace of Quantum Field Theory. He is trying to understand the right way to axiomatize the way in which the Hilbert space of a QFT depends on the boundary of space-time in a local fashion. In his talk he worked out things for the case of a free scalar on an arbitrary manifold. Also this week, Peter Teichner and Stephan Stolz spoke on their work on generalized cohomology and QFT, motivated by trying to understand the relation of elliptic cohomology and conformal field theory. Teichner gave the first part of the talk on Tuesday, Stolz gave the second part on Thursday. For more about their work, see some earlier comments of mine, their paper What is an elliptic object?, and an earlier survey talk by Teichner at the KITP.
Hi Peter,
You might be interested in this. I recently translated an interview with Renate Loll of Utrecht. The article has a fairly critical view of String Theory, along with comments on her own research and the position of women in science (Lubos is going to love this 🙂 ).
Here is an exerpt. If you want the entire article, give me word.
Superstring Theory
According to superstring theory the most elementary particles in the universe do not consist of points, but of a kind of vibrating ellastic bands, whose vibrations manifest themselves as particles, like electrons or photons. Although the theory initially seemed to be a promising candidate to bridge the gap between relativity and quantum theory, it seems to be more and more clear that the theory has her own share of problems. The most serious complication is that according to this theory our world is part of a ten dimensional universe, without us noticing in our everyday lives. Possibly is our threedimensional universe floating through higher dimensions, in the same way as a two dimensional flying carpet is flying throug three dimensional space, separated from a shadowworld that may be only a few tenths of a milimeter away, as Spinoza winner Robert Dijkgraaf recently decribed.
Altough Renate Loll is careful with her formulation as to not antagonize any of her colleagues, it is clear that she does not think much of this line of research. “Initially, superstring theory looked to be very simpel and therefore attractive, but graduately there emerged more and more complications, making me to find it quite a far fetched theory now. In addition it is unclear wether the string approach will lead us somewhere. That’s why I favour my own approach. That at least has produced some concrete results.�
Gerard ‘t Hooft, just like Renate Loll, isn’t at all convinced by string theorists. But wether the approach of his colleague from Utrecht is correct, is still a question according to him. “It is clear that Renate has made progress the last few years, but she’s not there yet. It’s even the question wether she is on the right track concerning QG. Although personally I tend to look in the direction of black holes I think that string theory still has the best hand. We have hit a number of obstacles, but none the less is that approach still more concrete and structured than other attemps to reconsile GR and QT. But that doesn’t mean that Renate couldn’t be right. My philosophy is, let everyone muddle on. She should continue with what she is doing, because the resolution of this problem will probably come from an unexpected direction.�
It’s very interesting to hear that ‘t Hooft says that “string theory still has the best hand”. Very interesting.
Hi Dimitri,
Sounds like an interesting article. I see you have a blog, perhaps you should post the full translation there?
Peter
Peter,
I’ve posted the full article on my blog. You can find it on my blog.