‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers’ – Interview 6

MICHAEL GREEN

Michael Green is one of the pioneers of the string framework. In collaboration with the Caltech theorist John Schwarz, he made a crucial breakthrough that led in 1984 to the what became known as the First String Revolution. Based at Cambridge University, he succeeded Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics (2009-2015), a post once held by Paul Dirac and Isaac Newton. In this interview with Graham, recorded last winter, Green talks about the string framework and its relationship with advanced mathematics, his memories of its early days – including its first revolution – and its potential to be the basis of a theory of all the fundamental forces of Nature.

This is the sixth of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on some of the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview will be posted weekly.

Among the interviewees are Nima Arkani-Hamed, Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Juan Maldacena, Michaela Massimi, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer, Lenny Susskind and Edward Witten.