Andrew Strominger

First, I did it in a sort of dutiful way.

These people say they've claimed quantum gravity.

I ought to read their papers, at least.

And then the more I read them, the more interested I got, and I began to see, you know, they...

They phrased it in a very clumsy way.

The description of string theory was very clumsy.

Mathematically clumsy, yeah.

It was all correct, but mathematically clumsy.

But it often happens that in all kinds of branches of physics that...

people start working on it really hard, and they sort of dream about it and live it and breathe it, and they begin to see inner relationships, and they see a beauty that is really there.

They're not deceived.

They're really seeing something that exists, but if you just kind of look at it, you know, you can't grasp it all in the beginning.

And so...

Our understanding of string theory in 1985 was almost all about

Weakly coupled waves of strings colliding and so on.

We didn't know how to describe a big thing like a black hole in string theory.

Of course, we could show that strings in theory in some limit reproduce Einstein's theory of general relativity and corrected it, but we couldn't do any better with black holes than...

before my work with Komron, we couldn't do any better than Einstein and Churchill had done.

Now, one of the puzzles, if you look at Hawking's headstone and also Boltzmann's headstone and you put them together, you get a formula for their really central equations in 20th century physics.

I don't