Viewing profile — zachf

Don’t worry, I didn’t think you were :) you’re welcome!

80 years? I would date its birth as 1968-9 (Veneziano), it’s hard for me to imagine calling prior work than that as “string theory”. But never mind that—the bigger problem with thi…

The kind of supersymmetry you’re referring to (global spacetime supersymmetry) is not required by string theory; this is a common misconception. Looking for super partners in a col…

I mean the people and land area governed by the United States Constitution, a document that provides explicit protections against the kind of ethnostate policies you are so worried…

Right, of course, extending the franchise of voting to women and non-white, non-landholding men devalued the franchise, lol.

America has a long history of successful integration of racial groups. Once upon a time, the Irish were extremely unwelcome in Boston, simply for being Catholics. Dozens of example…

So you would support naturalization of immigrants who agree with your views, then?

I remember hearing that exact phrase, word for word, back in 2008 about gay marriage. Guess what happened next?

Okay, I’ll tell you about my own research. From studying the way that geometric surfaces work in AdS, we conjectured a relationship between the stress tensor of QFT and entanglemen…

No, this is a shallow understanding of AdS/CFT. If you want to study quantum gravity when it is weakly coupled to matter, you can use AdS/CFT regardless of whether the background s…

There are in fact exceptionally strong incentives to discover alternatives to quantum gravity which could be tested in experiments. These are the same incentives that always drive …

Is your preferred remedy that quantum gravity be entirely defunded, or instead that more funding be redirected to any of the other programs to study quantum gravity? If the latter,…

You would probably learn more by listening to Cumrun Vafa [0] than anything I could say. It’s hard to say much about string theory without space time supersymmetry not because it d…

You mean, if string theory does not turn out to describe the universe, how could it be useful? Well, by giving extraordinarily powerful tools for understanding things that are well…

If you have something specific in mind, I’m happy to address it! But I’m not quite sure what you’re referencing.

To whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.

There are exactly zero free parameters in string theory [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of it is …

Most quantum computer experts think that this is not the case, that it is very unlikely that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems like travelling salesman more efficien…

This is one of those things that laymen often misunderstand, actually. (I don’t blame you, it’s often not well explained.) General relativity is easy to make into a QFT. There’s an…