Well, I dashed off a lecture summary to be printed out in time for the public lecture on Thursday:
Title: Strings Everywhere?
Hold it right there. What is the meaning of the title? I’m riffing on two things, one physical and the other sociological. The first, vastly more important theme is the fact that strings are powerful tools that represent one of the major steps in modern “technologies” (like quantum field theory) that are useful in several areas of theoretical physics, and -I suspect- may well become useful in several other areas as the field matures. I have in mind the idea of an “effective theory”: that there are physical phenomena that are not as easily (or in some cases -not at all-) described by standard particle-like theories (quantum field theories, relativistic or otherwise) as they are by string theories. Stringy techniques -quantum mechanics of extended objects- have and (I suspect) will continue to show up in diverse places in physics, and not just particle physics where it began. I hope to give some indication of this in the talk. One of my primary examples will be the contrast between electromagnetism and the strong interactions, I imagine. There are phenomena like quark confinement that are rather hard to describe using standard QFT, but seem to be extremely natural in a string theory framework…
The second, which to my mind is a storm in a teacup, is the issue of strings showing up all over the press, and increasingly (because the press -editors, some writers, and publishers- love a controversy and a David-vs-Goliath fairlytale, sadly sometimes at the expense of painting an accurate picture; see e.g., here) in a negative light as being some useless juggernaut-come-cult. I’ll talk about that a bit too…
Anyway, here is the blurb I dashed off for the background to the lecture: