AdS/CFT

In the middle 80s of last century John Henry Schwarz doggedly pursued a hunch. Strings were the way to go. Charged point particles didn't make sense in a quantum relativistic description of reality.

I still remember how physicists used to smile when told in the early 70s that everything would be fine if we just lived in more than four dimensions. All infinities would go away if we just broadened our view of space. I guess, after the three to four step given by Einstein sixty years prior, that was not much of a stretch.The Theory of Everything (TOE), was just around the corner.

Also in the middle 80s high temperature superconductivity (HTS) was proven experimentally. If one could just give a set of neat equations to calculate with, we could really get to 300 ^o K, and start collecting the billions of dollars one could realistically see in a brand new electrical industry.

Here we are twenty years later, we neither have a HTS, nor a TOE theory.

Now come Juan Maldacena, Alexei Polyakov, and a score of new smart faces, and we hear again that at least one of those problems (HTS) may be solved with the mathematical equipment built for the the TOE.

If you want to know what this young men are saying read John McGreevy's lectures delivered in Santa Barbara this summer.

Holographic duality with a view toward many-body physics.