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Murray Gell-Mann - Boundary conditions in the context of string theory (158/200)

2,678 views · Published 12 May 2016 · 1:10 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: [GW] Is it conceivable to talk about boundary conditions in the usual sense? Or make guesses of boundary conditions when we're working in ten or eleven dimensions?

Well, if you start early enough and if there really are extra dimensions that are not collapsed to zero, and you start early enough, your initial condition would have to be specified in this large number of dimensions. That's certainly true. But we'll have to see what happens as a result of considering at the same time the base space and the target space, as they call them in superstring or M-theory, because it looks as if the most fundamental way to look at the theory is in the base space, just one dimension nowadays—formerly two—and the target space is then one of the consequences of the theory, one of the constructs in the theory. So the whole concept of initial condition might somehow change.

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