Andrew Strominger

I think it's a...

a logical error to think that string theory is either right or wrong or dead or alive.

What it is is a stepping stone.

And an analogy I like to draw is Yang-Mills theory, which I mentioned a few minutes ago in the context of standard model.

Yang-Mills theory was discovered by Yang and Mills in the 50s, and they thought that the symmetry of Yang and Mills theory described the relationship between the proton and the neutron.

That's why they invented it.

That turned out to be completely wrong.

It does, however, describe everything else in the standard model.

And it had a kind of inevitability.

They had some of the right pieces, but not the other ones.

Sure.

They didn't have it quite in the right context.

And it had an inevitability to it, and it eventually sort of found its place.

And it's also true of Einstein's

theory of general relativity.

You know, he had the wrong version of it in 1914, and he was missing some pieces.

And you wouldn't say that his early version was right or wrong.

He'd understood the equivalence principle.

He'd understood spacetime curvature.

He just didn't have everything.