Andrew Strominger

There was no map.

So I don't know how we're going to connect in a concrete way all these ideas of string theory to the real world and

You know, when I started out in graduate school, I said, what is the most interesting problem that there might be, the deepest, most interesting problem that there might be progress on in 60 years?

And I think it could be, you know, that in another 30 years that maybe we'll learn that we have understood how black holes store information.

You know, that doesn't seem wild, that we're able to abstract what we learned from string theory and show that it's operative.

And, you know, I mean, the Bose-Einstein concept, they did, you know, when Bose and Einstein predicted it, when was that, the 30s maybe, early 30s, it took, there were 20 orders of magnitude that were needed

in order to, in improvement, in order to measure it.

And they did, 50 years later.

And you couldn't have guessed how that had happened, how they could have gotten that.

And it could happen that we, I don't think we're going to see the heterotic string spectrum at an accelerator, but it could be that

things come around in an interesting way and somehow it comes together.

And the fact that we can't see to the end

isn't a reason not to do it.

What did they do when they were trying to find the Pacific?

They took every route.

They just tried everything.

And that's what we're doing.

And I'm taking the one that my nose tells me is the best.

And other people are taking other ones, and that's good.

Because we need every person taking every route.