{"id":13912,"date":"2024-04-11T17:04:45","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T21:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13912"},"modified":"2024-04-11T17:11:57","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T21:11:57","slug":"what-is-string-theory-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13912","title":{"rendered":"What is String Theory?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This semester the KITP has been running a program asking <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kitp.ucsb.edu\/activities\/strings24\">What is String Theory?<\/a>, which is winding up next week, and was promising to &#8220;arrive at a deeper answer to the question in the title.&#8221;  It seems though that this effort has gone nowhere, with <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Saraht0n1n\/status\/1778476225121693736\">this report<\/a> from the scene:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Went to a string theory conference with many of the top researchers in the field centered around tackling the question \u201cwhat is string theory\u201d and the consensus after the conference was that nobody knows lmao<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For an answer to the question from someone with a lot more experience, I recently noticed that Lubos Motl is very <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/profile\/Lubo%C5%A1-Motl\">active on Quora<\/a>, giving thousands of sensible answers to a range of questions, especially having to do with Central Europe.  He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/Is-M-theory-the-same-as-string-theory\">explains<\/a> the relation of string theory and M-theory (disagreeing with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/M-theory\">Wikipedia<\/a>), and defines string theory as<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>the name of the consistent theory of quantum gravity which covers all the vacua found in the context of critical string theory and M-theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I had trouble getting my head around the concept of an undefined theory known to be consistent when I first heard about it nearly 30 years ago, but it seems to still be a thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This semester the KITP has been running a program asking What is String Theory?, which is winding up next week, and was promising to &#8220;arrive at a deeper answer to the question in the title.&#8221; It seems though that this &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13912\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13912"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13914,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13912\/revisions\/13914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}