I attended a talk given by Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton University. The title of his talk was, "The Search for
the Ultimate Structure of Matter," or in other words, String Theory.
String theorists want to replace the Quantum Field Theory Standard
Model with String Theory. It wasn't known until later, but string theory
contains within its mathematical constructs quantum gravity automatically,
something the Standard Model has been trying to incorporate for quite some
time. Current questions in string theory include: Are the five types of
strings really one object seen in different situations? Is the
cosmological constant nonzero? How does spacetime work in the context of
strings? The search for answers to these and other questions should keep
many physicists occupied well into the next century, if not longer.

 

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