Michael R. Douglas

Michael R. Douglas (born November 19, 1961) is an American theoretical physicist, known for his work on the string landscape.

Quotes

• Superstring theory has been studied intensively since 1984, when the discovery of Green and Schwarz of anomaly cancellation convinced many physicists that it provides a consisten theory of perturbative quantum gravity, gauge interactions and chiral matter. The basic difficulties in quantizing general relativity and supergravity (non-renormalizability or at least strong coupling at the Planck scale) are visible at low order in the loop expanison, while superstring theory was shown to be well-defined and finite to all orders.
  • (1996). "Superstring dualities, Dirichlet branes and the small scale structure of space". arXiv preprint hep-th/9610041. (quote from p. 1)

• We believe string theory has a set of solutions, some of which might describe our world. Even leaving aside the question of few vacua or many, and organizing principles, perhaps the most basic question about the landscape is whether it will turn out to be more like mathematics, or more like chemistry.
  • (2006). "Understanding the landscape". arXiv preprint hep-th/0602266. (quote from p. 9)

• ... I am going to go out on a limb, and argue that
  • • String/M-theory will predict that our universe has supersymmetry, broken at the 30 – 100 TeV scale. If at the lower values, we may see gluinos at LHC, while if at the higher values, it will be very hard to see any evidence for supersymmetry.
  • (2012). "The string landscape and low energy supersymmetry". arXiv preprint hep-th/1204.6626. (quote from p. 3)