# More of the Same (Physics, Math and Unification)

I was going to just provide the following links with a some comments, but decided it would be a good idea to put them into what seems to me the larger context of where we are in fundamental physics and its relationship to mathematics.

For the latest on the conventional physics approach to unification (GUTS, SUSY, strings, M-theory), there’s:

• The Lex Fridman podcast has an interview with Cumrun Vafa. Going to the section (1:19:48) – Skepticism regarding string theory) where Vafa answers the skeptics, he has just one argument for string theory as a predictive theory: it predicts that the number of spacetime dimensions is between 1 and 11.
• A second edition of Gordon Kane’s String Theory and the Real World has just appeared. One learns there (page 1-19) that

There is good reason, based on theory, to think discovery of the superpartners of Standard Model particles should occur at the CERN LHC in the next few years.

For the latest in mathematics and the interface of math and physics, there’s

In the Gaiotto-Witten case, some of what they discuss is very familiar to me: geometric quantization has been a topic of fascination since my student days, and one major goal of my QM book was to work out in detail (for the case of $\mathbf R^{2d}$) some of the subtleties about quantization that they discuss. For co-adjoint orbits in Lie algebras, geometric quantization has a long history, and “brane quantization” may or may not have anything new to say about this. For moduli spaces of vector bundles on Riemann surfaces, and Hitchin moduli spaces of Higgs bundles on Riemann surfaces, “brane quantization” might come into its own.