Andrew Strominger

Well, okay, but just to sort of throw one thing in, in order to answer every question, we would need a theory of the origin of the universe.

Right.

And that is a huge task, right?

And the fact that the universe seems to have a beginning

defies everything we know and love, right?

Because one of the basic principles of physics is determinism, that the past follows from, the present follows from the past, the future follows from the present, so on.

But if you have the origin of the universe, if you have a Big Bang, that means before that, there was nothing.

And you can't have a theory in which something follows from nothing.

No, no.

I like this because it's so hard to understand.

I like it because it's hard to understand, but it's really challenging us.

I don't think we're close to solving that problem.

And string theory has basically had nothing.

There's been almost nothing interesting said about that in the last many decades.

Not successfully.

There aren't compelling papers that lots of people have read that...

people have taken it up and tried to go at it, but there aren't compelling.

Strings theory doesn't seem to have a trick that

that helps us with that puzzle.

You've already gotten yourself in trouble, you see, because you used the word reverse engineer.