Andrew Strominger

Yeah, yeah.

And so we're never very sure which are the really important ones.

Yes, because that one has been understood since the 50s.

Pauli was the first person to notice it, and Hawking in the early 70s gave it a really much more visceral form.

And people have been hurling themselves at it, trying to reduce it to some technicality, but nobody has succeeded.

And the efforts to understand it have led to all kinds of interesting relations between quantum systems and science.

and applications to other fields and so on.

Yeah.

It's a theory that describes everything with astonishing accuracy.

It's the most accurate theory in the history of human thought.

Theory and experiment have been successfully compared to 16 decimal place.

We have that stenciled on the door where I work.

It's an amazing feat of the human mind.

It describes the electromagnetic interaction, unifies the electromagnetic interaction with the so-called weak interaction, which you need some good tools to even view the weak interaction.

And then there's the strong interaction, which binds the quarks into protons.

And the forces between them are mediated by something called Yang-Mills theory, which is a beautiful mathematical generalization of electromagnetism in which the analogs of the photons themselves carry charge.

And so this, the final piece of this,

of the standard model.

Everything in the standard model has been observed.

Its properties have been measured.