An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution
It is now almost a century since the year 1905, in which the principle
of relativity and the hypothesis of the quantum of radiation were introduced.
It has taken most of that time to synthesize the two into the modern
quantum theory of fields and the standard model of particle phenomena.
Although there is undoubtably more to be learned both theoretically and
experimentally, it seems likely that we know most of the basic principles
which follow from combining the special theory of relativity with quantum
mechanics.It is unlikely that a major revolution will spring from this soil.
By contrast, in the 80 years that we have had the general theory of relativity,
nothing comparable has been learned about the quantum theory of
gravitation.The methods that were invented to quantize electrodynamics,
which were so successfully generalized to build the standard model, prove
wholly inadequate when applied to gravitation.The subject is riddled with
paradox and contradiction.O ne has the distinct impression that we are
thinking about the things in the wrong way.T he paradigm of relativistic
quantum field theory almost certainly has to be replaced.