Today, on Twitter I came across a post by Thomas Van Riet [see here], that seeing Strings 2023, the name of the conference should be ``the conference previously known as Strings". This is true -- in fact, so much so that Aron Wall at the beginning of his talk said something along the lines of ``... I am going to do something unusual, and actually talk about string theory ...". Of course -- string talks were present quite nicely; for instance, Remmen gave a talk on his work with Cheung on bespoke dual resonance [2308.03833], Wall on off shell strings and black hole entropy, Sen on logarithmic corrections to supersymmetric black holes and Eberhardt for instance. That said, there were a number of talks that weren't exactly strings -- for instance, Suvrat's talk on the Hilbert space of de Sitter quantum gravity, Engelhardt on an algebraic ER=EPR with Hong Liu (something I am excited to read on, since I had some speculation on similar lines), and Strominger on cosmic ER=EPR in dS/CFT with Cotler. For that matter, a stringy context of de Sitter is something I (and presumably some other people) are wary of. The most ``trustworthy" paper I have read on de Sitter compactifications in string theory is the one by Van Riet, Bena and Grana [2303.17680]. However, I think the star of the show (pardon me for this statement; I found many other talks great as well, but... Well..) was Witten's talk on a background independent formalism for quantum gravity, based on the paper [2308.03663].
But, unsurprisingly (since it is Twitter), some people pointed out some opposition to string theory. Well.. I suppose this is where I say that politics arises with trying to compete with string theory. Between Republicans and Democrats, I may be able to choose at some point given some understanding. But with string theory, I doubt anyone will ever say ``oh! Loops look better now!". Or indeed any other theory. Anyone saying ``that theory is wrong, this is better" are essentially trying to gamble with this false politics.
P.S. Twitter is messed up. Millions of years of evolution and this is what it boils down to.
Not surprised. i know many who argue 24 hrs a day on twitter about string theory. But ultimately I think loop quantum gravity is better because no extra dimensions are present. But what is good about string theory? Just a question.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
DeleteI am not sure if you should think loops are ``better" than strings purely due to extra dimensions. There are a lot of good things about strings; one of the most (if not the most, considering hep-th citations) famous results (presuming you know about some aspects of holography), AdS/CFT in fact, was idealized from type IIB string theory and $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM between AdS$_{5}\cross S^{5}$ and $B_{4}$. I am no expert in strings or even qualified to talk on this. However, like I said, there is no meaning to arguing between theories -- what is more wise is to pick the theory that seems to provide a better description and see what works in it are leading to. The best place to start from is something like Green, Schwarz and Witten or 't Hooft, and after reading current papers, you can figure it out for yourself.
Best,
Vaibhav.