Gravity

  • Consistent only if it includes gravity
  • Unlike standard model: only if gravity is left out

9+1 dimensions

  • Violent jittery quantum motion of a strong can pile up
  • Only in 9+1D: delicate conditions met so that oscillation of all modes of every string precisely match each other and become undetectable

Supersymmetric moduli space

  • Every fermion/boson has its boson/fermion
  • Vacuum energy = 0
  • Most of string theory research is about this plain

M-theory

  • Not many theories, but many solutions
  • Correspond to extreme values of the moduli (corner of the landscape)
  • Continuously vary so that one morphs into any other

Line represents particles moving through spacetime

Sheets represent strings moving through spacetime

Closed string splitting into two

He suggested that the smooth, continuous world sheet is really a network or mesh of closely spaced lines and vertices. In other words it is a very complicated, but otherwise ordinary, Feynman diagram composed of a great many propagators and vertices.

Link to original