Joseph Polchinski: String

Joseph Polchinski was physicist working on string theory. Explore interesting quotes on string.
Joseph Polchinski: 6   quotes 0   likes

“In the open string the gauge charges are carried by the Chan-Paton degrees of freedom at the endpoints. In the closed string the charges are carried by fields that move along the string.”

Joseph Polchinski

[String theory: Volume 2, superstring theory and beyond, Cambridge University press, 1998, https://books.google.com/books?id=WKatSc5pjOgC&pg=PA59] (page 59)

Gauge , Freedom

“On notable classmate was Dan Friedan. Friedan stunned me, and I think everyone else, at his Ph. D. seminar, when he showed that Einstein's equation, the basic equation of general relativity, could be interpreted in terms of one of the basic objects in QFT, the β function that governs the energy scale. I did not see what this could possibly mean, but a few years later it showed up as one of the key ideas in string theory.”

Joseph Polchinski Memories of a Theoretical Physicist

Memories of a Theoretical Physicist, arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.09093, 2017 https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09093, (pp. 30–31)

Idea , Thinking

“In all there are four arguments here for the multiverse: the failure of conventional methods for understanding why the cosmological constant is not large, the success of the environmental theories for doing so, the successful prediction of the nonzero cosmological constant, and the string landscape.”

Joseph Polchinski

[Why trust a theory? Some further remarks (part 1)., arXiv.org, 2016, http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.06145] (p. 4)

Failure , Understanding , Success