The following is a conversation with Kamarand Vafa, a theoretical physicist that Harvard

specializing in strength theory.

He is the winner of the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which is the

most lucrative academic prize in the world.

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As a side note, let me say that strength theory is a theory of quantum gravity that unifies

quantum mechanics and general relativity.

It says that quirks, electrons, and all other particles are made up of much tinier strings

of vibrating energy.

They vibrate in ten or more dimensions, depending on the flavor of the theory.

Different vibrating patterns result in different particles.

From its origins, for a long time, strength theory was seen as too good not to be true,

but has recently fallen out of favor in the physics community, partly because over the

past forty years it has not been able to make any novel predictions that could then be

validated through experiment.

Nevertheless, to this day, it remains one of our best candidates for a theory of everything,

or a theory that unifies the laws of physics.

Let me mention that a similar story happened with neural networks in the field of artificial

intelligence, where it fell out of favor after decades of promise and research, but found

success again in the past decade as part of the deep learning revolution.

So I think it pays to keep an open mind, since we don't know which of the ideas in physics

...