47th Annual Smith Lecture
The Ohio State University Department of Physics presented the 47th Annual Smith Lecture Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. in room 131 Hitchcock Hall, located at 2070 Neil Ave. University of California at Santa Barbara physicist David J. Gross presented "The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics." Prof. Gross won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, for solving in 1973 the last great remaining problem of what is now known as "the Standard Model". They made the key discovery of how the "strong" force works to bind quarks into protons and neutrons. Since the mid 1980s, Professor Gross has worked on superstring theory. He is one of the inventors of the "heterotic" string theory, which remains today the most appropriate starting point for obtaining the sought after "theory of everything".
ABSTRACT:
I review the present state of knowledge in elementary particle physics and the questions that we are currently addressing. I discuss the experimental revolutions that might occur at the Large Hadron Collider, soon to be finished at CERN. I shall also review the state of string theory. The necessity to go beyond the standard model of particle physics and to understand quantum gravity has led to this ambitious attempt to unify all the forces of nature and all forms of matter as different vibrations of a string-like object. But string theory is still in a pre-revolutionary stage. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in the last decade we still lack a fundamental understanding of the theory. Many string theorists suspect that a profound conceptual change in our concept of space and time will be required for the final formulation of string theory.
Streaming video is available here.
