[neutralino]

Originally Posted by Profpat Hi Neutralino; I know you are an advocate of the standard model, but what are your thoughts regarding strings? Best, Pat

I don't dislike strings, more than I dislike particles or any other type of fundamental building block. I think strings could possibly be the right answer.

I'm not too sure about string theory either, although there is obviously a long way to go on researching the theory. One thing that makes me sceptical is the fact that there are of order 10^500 possible string theories that make up the string landscape, so it's going to be hit or miss whether we ever find a string theory that works. It kind of makes sense if you think about it though; 3 spacial dimensions that we are used to, and through which all the forces can act, one temporal dimension, and then a number of compactified dimensions through which only the gravitational force can act. (This tends to be called the "bulk" and the 3 dimensional spatial surface on which we live is called a "brane.") This braneworld scenario also has some interesting ways of explaining cosmological events, like inflation (in fact, I know a few people working on this at the moment). Basically, inflation comes about through our universe's brane moving in the bulk at some time in the past. String theory, however, has many unknown parameters, and each theory has different values for each parameter to make it "work." Hopefully, we'll be able to constrain some of these in the future using various techniques, but I'm not sure.