Hello everybody and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and I remember a time

It must have been like 20 years ago by now my goodness

I was a postdoctoral fellow doing research at the Institute for the Radical Physics that you see Santa Barbara

And in fact, I was not doing research at the moment

I was just wandering through one of the local bookstores and I saw this kid

He couldn't have been more than nine or ten years old and he found a book and his eyes lit up

And he got the book he ran over to his mom. It was Christmas shopping season

And the kid says to his mom he says mom mom mom look we got to get this for dad

It's the elegant universe. He'll love it. It's about string theory

And that was the moment when I knew that super string theory or just string theory for short had entered the popular

Imagination in large part thanks to Brian Greene's excellent book the elegant universe and the Nova TV special that followed it

Which is a weird thing to have a theory of quantum gravity or a theory of everything which is perhaps what string theory could be

To be out there in the public debated right not just you know told to people and they go, huh?

That's interesting people out there on the streets have really strong opinions about string theory some love it

Some are very disdainful of it. That's a weird state of being for a speculative highly technical theory in theoretical physics

For some reason string theory captures the imagination

One of my fellow postdocs at the ITP back in those days was Clifford Johnson who is today's guest on the Winescape podcast

Clifford is an official card carrying string theorist

He's written many papers on various different aspects of string theory

He's even authored a book called D-brains D-brains are part of the string theory toolbox and it's a highly technical book

I do not necessarily encourage you to buy it unless you were a professional physicist

I do encourage you to buy Clifford's more recent book called simply the dialogues

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