String theory talk online

[steuard]

About a year ago, I gave a talk to the Chicago chapter of the MIT Alumni Club on the basics of string theory (with a few equations). It was a fun experience, and after all this time I've finally put the slides online (along with some explanatory text to take the place of my spoken comments). You can find it at my site on slimy.com if you'd like to take a look.

I haven't linked it up from my main website yet, because I get a fair bit of traffic (mostly from my Lagrange multipliers tutorial, with a little bleed-over from my Tolkien site and my Prom King story) and I still feel like parts of this thing aren't up to "final draft" quality. The slides are fine (I hope!), and they aren't going to change in any case, but I wrote some chunks of the explanatory text late at night (which may have made it even more rambling than usual). So if you have any helpful comments (or complaints), I'd love to hear them! Once I've gotten a few eyes to look at the thing, I'll go ahead and share it with the world more directly.

Comments

Yay synchronicity

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Just two days ago i was watching the Nova series on string theory :)

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

Reads pretty good. Despite its extreme comparitive brevity, I found that your presentation actually provided me with greater intuition (after a day of subconscious reflection) about what the theory means than the NOVA series did. I think NOVA dumbed it down a bit too far to be as interesting and informative as I prefer.

I especially liked the stringy feynman diagram.