Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Tuesday, February 20, 2001
4:10pm, Room 118 Physics-Astronomy Building
Michael Duff, University of Michigan
THE THEORY FORMERLY KNOWN AS STRINGS
Superunification of all the fundamental interactions underwent a major
paradigm shift in 1984 when eleven-dimensional supergravity was
knocked off its pedestal by ten-dimensional superstrings. These last
five years have witnessed a new shift of equal proportions:
perturbative ten-dimensional superstrings have in their turn been
superseded by a new non-perturbative theory called M-theory
which describes supermembranes and superfivebranes, which subsumes
all five consistent string theories and whose low energy limit is,
ironically, eleven-dimensional supergravity.
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