Andrew Strominger

I mean, technically, you would have to say it was wrong.

And technically, you would have to say Yang and Mills were wrong.

And I guess in that sense, I would believe just odds are

We always keep finding new wrinkles.

Odds are we're going to find new wrinkles in string theory, and technically what we call string theory now isn't quite right, but... We're always going to be wrong, but hopefully a little bit less wrong every time.

Exactly.

And I would, you know, bet the farm, as they say.

I say that much more seriously because not only do I have a farm, but we just renovated it.

on the guess that 100 years from now, string theory will be viewed as a stepping stone towards a greater understanding of nature.

And another thing that I didn't mention about string theory is, of course, we knew that it solved the infinities problem, and then we later learned that it also solved Hawking's puzzle about what's inside of a black hole.

you put in one assumption, you get five things out.

Somehow you're doing something right.

You know, probably not everything, but you're, you're, you're, you know, there's some good signposts and there, there've been a lot of good signposts like that.

Yeah.

So that is a very interesting story.

I was interested in black holes before I was interested in string theory.

I was sort of a reluctant string theorist in the beginning.

I thought I had to learn it because people were talking about it.

But once I studied it, I...

I grew to love it.