Strings 2005

I found out about the Strings 2005 conference held at the University of Toronto this past week when I was researching strings for the post below. The conference apparently boasted 400 attendees from around the globe, with over 50 speakers. Since I found out about it yesterday, it was too late for me to investigate it in much detail -- what I did catch however, was the public talks by Robbert Dijkgraaf of the University of Amsterdam, entitled "Strings, Black Holes, and the the End of Space and Time" -- and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University, entitled "Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design."

These were public talks, geared towards the generalist audience, for which I was thankful for -- I don't think I would have stayed awake through any in depth exploration of the mathematics of String Theory. Both Dijkgraaf and Susskind were good public speakers -- aware of their audience and not going too deep. Their sense of humour made the talks that much more lively -- not that the topic wasn't interesting -- it was. Susskind took a call from the Pope before he started his talk (not for real) and Dijkgraaf kept referring to Dutch stereotypes. Both speakers were enjoyable to listen to. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, but that didn't really matter.

The audience however was a different story. For the most part, they were polite and attentive, but during the question periods, the lunatics woke up. One man had left his seat during the talk, presumably to go to the bathroom. When he came back, someone else was sitting in his seat. How was anyone to know he was coming back? He started yelling at the guy who was in his seat when he approached the row -- oblivious to the fact that people were there to listen to the speaker. Another guy got really pissed when he couldn't ask his question, and during the second question period, he got a chance to ask one. His question was dumb. He wanted to know what String Theory meant to the existence of life on Earth. WTF? The friend who was with me at the talk, overheard him during the break commenting about how he didn't care for outer space and aliens, just what was happening on Earth.

I'm just confused. Did these people come from an asylum? Based on some of the questions being asked, I don't think any of them knew what the topic of the talks were going to be. Somebody should have done a sanity check at the doors.

For related information on this topic, check out the following links:

Presentation materials from the conference.

String Theory and the Path to Unification: A Review of Recent Developments [PDF] -- an older, but still valid paper.

String Theory Reviews -- more articles and papers on String Theory than you can shake a stick at!