Short bio: Professor Andrew Strominger's research concerns quantum gravity, string theory, and quantum field theory. He is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
Professor Strominger begins his talk by pointing out that scientists have long sought answers to the most vexing questions about our universe. In fact, scientific inquiry goes back hundreds if not thousands of years, and during that time, we have learned quite a lot about the world that we live in. We understand, for example, how light comes out of bulbs, or how food becomes energy in our body. But there are plenty of unanswered questions left for theoretical physicists to tackle: How did the universe begin? Why are there three space dimensions and only one time dimension?
For a physicist who wants to take on these big questions, a bold-face contradiction is "your best friend," says Strominger, because it helps you narrow down your inquiry and figure out where to dig in your heels. "If we look at the history of physics, all the great advances in the way that we view our universe have had behind them some kind of puzzle or contradiction," he says. String theory, then, has sprung up as a possible solution to the main inconsistency between the two great pillars of 20th century physics: Einstein's theory of general relativity, or gravity, and quantum field theory.