Andrew Strominger

And sometime in the early 90s, we began to understand the mathematics of string theory better and better.

And it came to the point where it was clear that this was something we might be able to compute.

And it was a kind of moment of truth for string theory because if it hadn't given the answer that Bekenstein and Hawking said it had to give for consistency, string theory itself would have...

been inconsistent and we wouldn't be doing this interview.

Well, string theory would have been inconsistent.

String theory would have been inconsistent.

The inconsistency, right.

Something else could have happened.

It would have been a major change in the way we think about string theory.

And it was a good thing that one supposition that the world is made of strings solves two problems, not one.

It solves the infinity problem and it solved the Hawking's problem.

And also the way that it did it was very beautiful.

It gave an alternate description.

So alternate description of things are...

are very common.

I mean, to take a simple example, this bottle of water here is 90% full.

I could say it's 90% full.

I could also say it's 10% empty.

Those are obviously the same statement.

And it's trivial to see that they're the same, but there are many statements