Event Type
Seminar
Tuesday, February 18, 2020 12:00 PM
Sarah McConnell (Stanford)

In past weeks, we've seen two theories which solve certain problems in classical physics: general relativity and quantum field theory. Unfortunately, they don't play well together. String theory tries to reconcile these two sets of ideas to produce a "theory of everything." I will attempt to give an overview of how string theory is set up in preparation for a more technical talk next week. I will define strings and explain (in a very vague way) how they might solve some of the conflicts between GR and QFT. I will also give a (hand-wavy, non-technical) definition of Gromov-Witten invariants in the context of strings.