March 1, 2000
Recently our understanding and perspective of string theory has undergone a complete revolution.
The talk will start with a review of the goals of the theory: a complete and coherent quantum theory of all particles and all forces including gravity.
We will then describe the evolution of our understanding of the theory starting with its origin in the late 60's through the developments of the 80's, when the behavior of string theory in perturbation theory was uncovered.
We will then turn to the recent excitement circling around its exact nonperturbative behavior. This has led to many deep and surprising results. Some of them solve long standing important open problems.
The University of Texas at Austin