So that'll happen towards the end of the lecture and we'll also dovetail in parts with tomorrow's lecture. And I'll tell you what some of the strategies and attempts are for proceeding. But I will really end by telling you what I think the central conceptual challenges in our field are today, that we just don't have good answers for. So I will start by telling you what the major issues are and the really significant progress that has happened in theoretical physics in the last 15 years, taking a very major step on getting a good part of the answer or at least what it might look like. So I'm going to be talking about a dramatic subject today, which is the end of space-time and what we're going to do without it or how are we going to deal with the fact that we have to replace it with something else? This is the first of the set of lectures which are really explicitly devoted to questions we don't have complete answers to. It's only to bad five people working on it at the time. And I have really been enjoying reading your papers from 10 years ago, which were really beautiful papers. And thank you very much for your kind words. But I have to say it's a particular pleasure to be introduced by him. NIMA ARKANI-HAMED: I must say that from the moment I met Maxim, it was clear he was going to be a big-shot professor at a big-shot university one day. NIMA ARKANI-HAMED: I must say that- um, is this on? So there are some seats that are still left. I think it's not because there is a big black hole that LHC will create and eat us up.īut if you're sitting not on a chair, but on anything else, a big black hole will come and eat you. It turns that this involves modifications to our ideas of space-time, compared to which large extra dimensions are just child's play. And guess what that subject is? It's multi-loop scattering amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric theories. It's probably the most exciting due to Nima's work and his collaborators. And in addition to Messenger Lectures, he gives us a few more technical lectures about the most exciting subject in theoretical physics right now. So 10 years later, he comes to Cornell to give Messenger Lectures. Nima goes on to invent a large number of amazingly inventive and amazing influential ideas, such as deconstruction, little Higgs theories, split supersymmetry, ghost condensation- among other things, he was great at naming things- theory of dark matter. I started working on large extra dimensions. So, of course, I drop everything I'm doing. You get a little restless.Īnd so one day I ran into this new postdoc, sitting down the hall, Nima, who just came up with this amazing new hypothesis that space-time can have extra dimensions, which are a millimeter across, about this big, a drastic change in our ideas of space-time. But you know how you're a graduate student, you work hard, but you get a little shifty. There was maybe about five people in the world working on that. I was a graduate student at Stanford, working on a beautiful, but extremely esoteric subject called multi-loop scattering amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric theories. So I'll try to make it a little more personal. So by now, you must know where Nima got his PhD and all that kind of stuff. So this is the third time you're here in this room this week. I'm a professor in the physics department. MAXIM PERELSTEIN: Well, I want to welcome everybody to the third lecture in the Messenger Lecture series for this year, by Nima Arkani-Hamed.
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