Brian Wecht
speaker
852 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Brian Wecht’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In the late 90s, which is a while ago now,
Maldacena came up with this idea called the ADS-CFT conjecture, which has been tremendously useful.
It's still a conjecture, but I don't think anyone thinks it's not right, in which a 10-dimensional string theory was discovered to have the exact same information as a four-dimensional quantum field theory.
And problems that were hard in one were easy in the other.
So what that meant is you could use string theory and geometry to study difficult problems in quantum field theory.
So that is a, you know, do any of those universes, you know, correspond to the one we live in?
No, definitely not.
However, if your question is, what is the structure of quantum field theories, which are theories that we know describe the universe, quantum field theory works.
It's been very, very well tested.
then this is an interesting thing to use as a theoretician because it gives you a thing to play with.
So the question of what happened to string theory, the answer really is it morphed from this thing where people were very optimistic or some people optimistic that it would describe the real world and it basically became a tool that is in the arsenal of theoretical physicists which sometimes gets deployed as needed to study different problems.
And I don't think that's, you know, obviously it'd be amazing if we found the unified theory of everything.
That's the best thing that could happen.
That is not happening with string theory.
And I think it's unambiguous that that's the case.
However, I think it's also amazing that it gave us this whole set of interesting and useful tools that we can study frameworks in theoretical physics.
Oh, really?
as you were
I think that exact arc happens a lot in science, right?
It's like, oh my God, this is going to do everything.
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