In his book Others have disagreed with Smolin's characterization of string theory.
In addition to providing insights into the mathematical structure of string theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence has shed light on many aspects of quantum field theory in regimes where traditional calculational techniques are ineffective.In the AdS/CFT correspondence, the geometry of spacetime is described in terms of a certain One can imagine a stack of hyperbolic disks where each disk represents the state of the universe at a given time. This understanding changed in 1995 when In the 1970s, many physicists became interested in Initially, many physicists hoped that by compactifying eleven-dimensional supergravity, it might be possible to construct realistic models of our four-dimensional world. He argues that the extreme popularity of string theory among theoretical physicists is partly a consequence of the financial structure of academia and the fierce competition for scarce resources.String theory is a powerful, well-motivated idea and deserves much of the work that has been devoted to it. One property of this boundary is that, within a small region on the surface around any given point, it looks just like The discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence was a major advance in physicists' understanding of string theory and quantum gravity. The Calabi–Yau manifolds used in string theory are of interest in pure mathematics, and mirror symmetry allows mathematicians to solve problems in Enumerative geometry studies a class of geometric objects called Generalizing this problem, one can ask how many lines can be drawn on a quintic Calabi–Yau manifold, such as the one illustrated above, which is defined by a polynomial of degree five. A Branes are frequently studied from a purely mathematical point of view, and they are described as objects of certain Prior to 1995, theorists believed that there were five consistent versions of superstring theory (type I, type IIA, type IIB, and two versions of heterotic string theory). Indeed, hyperbolic space can have more than two dimensions and one can "stack up" copies of hyperbolic space to get higher-dimensional models of anti-de Sitter space.An important feature of anti-de Sitter space is its boundary (which looks like a cylinder in the case of three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space). One of the relationships that can exist between different string theories is called Another relationship between different string theories is Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime according to the rules of quantum mechanics. One of the deepest problems in modern physics is the problem of One of the main developments of the past several decades in string theory was the discovery of certain 'dualities', mathematical transformations that identify one physical theory with another. In the currently accepted models of stellar evolution, black holes are thought to arise when massive stars undergo In the twentieth century, physicists began to apply the same concepts to black holes. In his book Some physicists believe this large number of solutions is actually a virtue because it may allow a natural anthropic explanation of the observed values of String theorist Leonard Susskind has argued that string theory provides a natural anthropic explanation of the small value of the cosmological constant.No vacuum in the string theory landscape is known to support a metastable, positive One of the fundamental properties of Einstein's general theory of relativity is that it is One of the main criticisms of string theory from early on is that it is not manifestly background independent.