Skip to content

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.

— Joseph Polchinski

Another quote →

More quotes by Joseph Polchinski

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.

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.

All Joseph Polchinski quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joseph Polchinski (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.