The Universal Heart Strings

Muss es sein? So wrote Beethoven in an epigraph to his last string quartet. In today's great quest for the Theory of Everything, physicists are led to ask the same: Must it be so? Do all interactions and all particles of nature fundamentally originate from a cosmic string quartet?  In this talk, we take the audience on a bird's-eye view of the theory of superstrings, what is it and why it is important. We will emphasize the wealth of ideas which has revolutionized the world of pure mathematics.

Gravity was the first force of nature that was understood in a precise mathematical way by Newton and much more fully at the start of the 20th century by Einstein. Others understood that Nature was governed by Quantum Mechanics. Combining General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics has been an outstanding challenge that led to the development of String Theory. By studying black holes in string theory Juan Maldacena was led to a remarkable conjecture known as holography, where Quantum Gravity is equivalent to conventional quantum theories similar to those that govern nuclear interactions!