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Joseph Polchinski Quotes

1954–2018 United States

Joseph Polchinski (16 May 1954 – 2 February 2018) was an American physicist, one of three winners of the 2017 Fundamental Prize. He is known for his research on D-branes.

United States
Academics
Physicists

Random Joseph Polchinski quote

5 quotes

You're not supposed to have equations in a public lecture, so think of this as a piece of art.

There is something missing in our understanding of space.

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.

Maxwell got a huge bonus for understanding the unification of electricity and magnetism. He understood the nature of light! When I first heard about this in high school I thought this was the coolest thing, and I still do. It's what we're all trying to do.

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Joseph Polchinski (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.