Niels Bohr Lecture by Prof. Chris Hull

What is String Theory?

Speaker

Abstract

String theory is around 50 years old and for much of that time it has been proclaimed as a “Theory of Everything” — a quantum theory of gravity unified with all forces and matter. However, we still don’t know its fundamental formulation, although we do now know it is not just a theory of strings. Nonetheless, it has led to many new and surprising insights, with concepts that were once seen as absolute now seen as relative. In this lecture I will give an introduction to string theory for non-experts, explaining how it arose and what problems it is trying to solve. I will then survey some of the insights that arise and discuss their implications for physics and the “Theory of Everything”. 

Biography

Prof. Chris Hull FRS is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London and a Fellow at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He is one of the leading researchers in string theory, supergravity and quantum gravity and has made groundbreaking contributions to these fields. He earned his PhD in Steven Hawking’s group in Cambridge, supervised by Gary Gibbons, and has held posts at MIT, Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. His work on the non-perturbative structure of superstring theory and its duality symmetries led to what has been called the second superstring revolution and laid the foundations for a new theory, M-theory, which underlies string theory and is our leading candidate for the “theory of everything”. In recognition of this work and his many other contributions to fundamental theoretical physics he was awarded the Dirac Medal in 2003 and in 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.