String Theory: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Johannes Lahnsteiner

Friday 15 Mar 2024, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6203 - Floor 6 Large Lunch Room (44 seats) (Albano Building 3)

The ultimate dream of reductionists has always been to find a theoretical framework that unifies all theories. One framework that can accurately describe all forms of matter and interactions. By accident, particle physicists of the 1960s stumbled over a candidate for such a framework and christened it string theory. In the public perception, it rose to be the wunderkind of theoretical physics, promising to finally achieve the ultimate theory of everything and solve the problem of quantum gravity and whatever else you might have been worried about. Fast-forward 60 years; a lot of the initial excitement has faded, string theory turned out to really be a theory of anything rather than everything, and proponents are accused of being *lost in math*.
In this talk I want to present an overview of what string theory truly promises, what it achieves, and where it fails. I will recount what happened during the superstring revolutions, ponder what to do with the swampland, and explain why string theory remains as the leading candidate for quantum gravity to this day.