Strings is a series of international conferences on the topic of string theory and quantum gravity, held annually since 1988. It is a key event for the string theory community. In 2004, it gathered about 400 participants, with several more online. [1] Important topics in string theory have been introduced for the first time during these conferences.
The first conference, Strings '88 was held from May 24 to 28, 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was inspired by the International Workshop on Strings, Composite Structures and Cosmology held in the same venue a year before. [2]
The conferences were not that promising at first and some scientists suggested to stop the annual meetings, however it gained popularity in the 1990s. [3] During Strings '95. Edward Witten discussed the concept of M-theory, sparking the second superstring revolution. [4] In Strings '96, Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind introduced matrix theory; [5] and during Strings '98, Jeffrey A. Harvey composed a song to celebrate Juan Maldacena recent discovery of AdS/CFT correspondence. [6]
During the Strings 2000, participants proposed and selected a "Top Ten Problems in Fundamental Physics for the Next Millenium", similar to the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics. [7] [8] The problems are:
| # | Statement | Proponents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Are all the (measurable) dimensionless parameters that characterize the physical universe calculable in principle or are some merely determined by historical or quantum mechanical accident and uncalculable? | David Gross |
| 2 | How can quantum gravity help explain the origin of the universe? | Edward Witten |
| 3 | What is the lifetime of the proton and how do we understand it? | Steven Gubser |
| 4 | Is Nature supersymmetric, and if so, how is supersymmetry broken? | Sergio Ferrara and Gordon L. Kane |
| 5 | Why does the universe appear to have one time and three space dimensions? | Shamit Kachru, Sunil Mukhi and Hirosi Ooguri |
| 6 | Why does the cosmological constant have the value that it has, is it zero and is it really constant? | Andrew Chambliss and Renata Kallosh |
| 7 | What are the fundamental degrees of freedom of M-theory (the theory whose low-energy limit is eleven-dimensional supergravity and which subsumes the five consistent superstring theories) and does the theory describe Nature? | Louise Dolan, Annamaria Sinkovics, and Billy & Linda Rose |
| 8 | What is the resolution of the black hole information paradox? | Tibra Ali and Samir D. Mathur |
| 9 | What physics explains the enormous disparity between the gravitational scale and the typical mass scale of the elementary particles? | Matt Strassler |
| 10 | Can we quantitatively understand quark and gluon confinement in Quantum Chromodynamics and the existence of a mass gap? | Igor Klebanov and Oyvind Tafjord |
Here is a list of Strings conferences: [9] [10]