AaS! 118: Is String Theory Worth It? (Part 4: What We Need is a Superhero)
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2019
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How did String Theory get started? What has made the idea so popular over the decades? Can we ever truly have a theory of quantum gravity? What is supersymmetry, the landscape, and the AdS/CFT Correspondence? What do holograms have to do with this? How many dimensions do we live in? Why does String Theory have such a hard time making predictions? How are we supposed to judge a theory that isn’t done yet? It’s a non-stop String Theory bonanza as I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What is beauty? |
| 0:11.6 | Well, that's a really lame way to start an episode because honestly, I'm the wrong guy to ask. |
| 0:17.1 | Seriously, you asked me a beauty about beauty and I just start thinking about cheese. |
| 0:21.7 | So instead we're going to talk about something else. |
| 0:25.3 | Symmetry. |
| 0:26.5 | Sometimes you hear that people say that symmetry is beautiful, but in math and physics, symmetry is powerful. |
| 0:35.7 | Almost all in modern physics, which is our deep understanding of the universe, |
| 0:39.9 | relies on symmetry. But what is symmetry? I hinted at it in the last episode. And today we're |
| 0:50.1 | going to keep it as super broad as possible because the symmetries that we're going to |
| 0:56.1 | explore are going to quickly go from obvious to arcane to just plain weird. And so the definition |
| 1:04.6 | of symmetry that I'm going to try to work with and we're going to explore and that we're |
| 1:09.8 | going to use in math and |
| 1:11.3 | physics is that when you change something about the situation and yet it stays the same. |
| 1:20.1 | So if you change something but it still stays the same, that is symmetry. For example, a symmetric |
| 1:26.3 | face. Whether you look at the right side versus the |
| 1:30.9 | left side of the face, you change something which side of the face you're looking at, but the face |
| 1:37.4 | still looks the same if it's symmetric. Like you're, it's been flipped, of course, because now you're |
| 1:43.4 | looking at the left side versus the right, |
| 1:45.2 | but the arrangement of the eyebrows in the size of the nostril, in the angle of the nasal labial fold, |
| 1:52.4 | they all look the same in a symmetric face, whether you're looking at the left or the right. |
| 1:57.1 | There's a symmetry in that face, and you might or might not also consider that particular face beautiful, but that's none of my business. |
| 2:04.2 | And it's not important. |
... |
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