This is the talk given by one of the most influential physicists alive today, Edward Witten, at Strings 2012. This talk takes a fresh view on what can be said about perturbation theory for superstrings. The topics discussed here can be found in the following paper (of the same name) by Witten: arxiv.org/abs/1209.5461 Witten is a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (IAS), and is widely regarded as the greatest living physicist and the heir of Einstein. There is not enough room in this description to do his astounding career justice, but he played a vital role in the development of string theory and was the first physicist to receive the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields medal. Witten resolved the hierarchy problem, developed Seiberg-Witten theory, Gromov-Witten theory, worked on the gravitational anomaly.... the list goes on. The Strings conference is the largest annual meeting of string theorists, and includes the biggest names in the subject giving talks on advancements made in essentially every aspect of the theory. Anyone who is interested in the subject should be quite interested in these talks! (I'm hoping to actually attend the conference this year in Seoul... but we'll see...) The lectures can be found, viewed, and downloaded from free from the website for the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, which was the venue for the conference in 2012). In particular, there are many more lectures which do not appear in this playlist (these are merely the lectures I personally find most interesting). Their website can be found here: www.theorie.physik.uni-muenchen.de/videos/strings2012­/index.html

Be the first to comment