Will We Ever Prove String Theory?
The Joy of Why
Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
4.9 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical elegance, the theory still lacks empirical evidence.
One of its most intriguing, yet vexing, implications is that if all matter and forces are composed of vibrations of tiny strands of energy, then this allows for a vast landscape of possible universes with different physical properties, varieties of particles and complex spacetimes. How, then, can we possibly pinpoint our own universe within a field of almost infinite possibilities?
Since 2005, Cumrun Vafa at MIT has been working to weed out this crowded landscape by identifying which hypothetical universes lie in a ‘swampland’ with properties inconsistent with the world we observe. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Vafa talks to co-host Janna Levin about the current state of string theory, why there are no more than 11 dimensions, how his swampland concept got an unexpected lift from the BICEP array, and how close we may be to testable predictions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Jana Levin. |
| 0:06.0 | And I'm Steve Strogetz. |
| 0:07.6 | And this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine exploring some of the biggest |
| 0:13.4 | unanswered questions in math and science today. |
| 0:19.0 | Hey, Steve. |
| 0:20.0 | Hi, Jana. Different day, different studio. Hi, Dana. |
| 0:21.2 | Different day, different studio. |
| 0:22.9 | Yes, I'm going for the Orson-Wells look here. |
| 0:25.1 | This is really dramatic, right? |
| 0:26.3 | I actually like it. |
| 0:27.4 | It's looking good. |
| 0:28.7 | I want to talk to you today about something that's gotten quite controversial, and so I really |
| 0:33.1 | want to ask your honest take on string theory. |
| 0:37.1 | How do you really feel about string theory? |
| 0:39.4 | I don't really have an informed opinion. That has never stopped anybody. |
| 0:45.4 | What I'm told is it's helping a lot in pure math, that the techniques from string theory are |
| 0:50.8 | being imported into fields like algebraic geometry. As for what it's doing for physics, |
| 0:56.2 | I get the feeling it's the best game in town, but it's hard to tell yet whether it's going to really |
| 1:02.9 | describe the physics of our universe. Yeah, I think it's been a fascinating legacy. So the excitement |
| 1:10.2 | initially was that string theory might do for quantum |
| 1:12.9 | gravity what all of these famous theories like the electro-week theory and the theories about the matter |
| 1:19.3 | forces did for matter, which is to say it unified them all into one sort of elegant equation. And so the |
... |
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