Andrew Strominger

And, you know, doesn't it seem that every time we answer some old questions, we'll just find new ones and that it will just keep going on forever and ever?

He said, well, that's what they used to say about the Nile.

They were never going to find the end.

then one day they found it yeah so i don't know um string theory doesn't string theory doesn't look like a candidate to me for a final theory it as it stands now it doesn't get to the bottom of the well it doesn't size into the whole yeah it seems to me that even if we kind of solved it and we've

did experiments, there still would be more questions, like why are there four dimensions instead of six?

It doesn't seem to have anything in it that would explain that.

You can always hope that there's something that we don't know about string theory that will explain it, but it still doesn't look like it's going to answer every question.

And why is there one time, not two?

It doesn't seem like it's

I don't even know what it would mean to answer every question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right, that's true.

So that would be a really interesting state of affairs if we could predict everything but not necessarily understand everything.

So for example...

Let's just forget about gravity.

I mean, we're not too far from that situation.

If we forget about gravity, the standard model, in principle, given a big enough computer, predicts almost everything.

But if you look at the standard model, it's kind of a laundry list with neutrino masses and all that stuff.

There are hundreds of free parameters.