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
If you like.
So it turns out, so it seems like a simple idea.
Who cares?
What it turns out is that if you really pursue this idea, it seems like a promising framework for reconciling two ideas in theoretical physics that had been at tension, which is quantum mechanics and general relativity or the theory of gravity.
Quantum mechanics is the study of the very small.
general relativity, the study of things that are pretty big.
And there was not one unified way that you could talk about both.
If you tried to do quantum mechanical calculations for gravity, you got incurable infinities, which you couldn't solve.
Sometimes you can solve infinities in physics.
Yeah, that's right.
There's something called renormalization, and it's not a big deal.
But some infinities you have to take very seriously.
And the infinities that you get when you do general relativity calculations or gravity calculations, basically scattering of gravitons off each other, which are quanta of gravity,
using quantum mechanical language were nonsense.
String theory provides a way of basically curing those infinities for technical reasons I'm not going to get into now.
So when this came along, people were like, oh my god, what if this is the grand unified theory of everything, a theory of everything that we could use to describe all of the fundamental forces and structure of the universe.
So people kind of went down this road.
The first big wave of hype was in the mid-80s because Green and Schwartz discovered a mechanism by which the theory was consistent called Green-Schwartz anomaly cancellation.
And people started taking this idea very seriously and immediately hit...
what seemed like they may be deal breakers, which is to say that if you want a string theory to be consistent, you need to have supersymmetry, which basically is a bunch of particles that, as far as we know, do not exist in nature.
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