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String Theory for the Scientifically Curious

High school outreach talk
Amanda Peet, University of Toronto

Slides

• All slides (4.5MB .pdf)

Amanda Peet is a Professor of Physics and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. They hold a B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Canterbury and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Their awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. They were one of the string theorists interviewed in the three-part NOVA PBS documentary "Elegant Universe". They grew up in the South Pacific island nation of Aotearoa/New Zealand and have a web site at ap.io/home.

Resources for laypeople

Web sites and videos

• Powers of Ten
• The Particle Adventure: fundamentals of matter and force
• superstringtheory.com
• PBS NOVA 3-part TV documentary: Elegant Universe (my interview)
• PBS NOVA 4-part TV documentary: Fabric of the Cosmos
• Prof. Leonard Susskind's lectures on Stanford's YouTube channel
• Black Holes and the Information Paradox, by Prof. Leonard Susskind

Books

• Universe on a T-shirt, by Dan Falk (Penguin, 2004)
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Prof. Brian Greene (Vintage, 2000)
• The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, by Prof. Brian Greene (Vintage, 2005)
• The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Prof. Brian Greene (Vintage, 2011)
• Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by Prof. Lisa Randall (Ecco, 2005)
• Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, by Prof. Lisa Randall (Ecco, 2011)
• Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, by Prof. Leonard Susskind (Back Bay, 2005)
• The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, by Prof. Leonard Susskind (Back Bay, 2009)

Advanced material

Stuff I wrote

• Advice for aspiring string theorists (for high school and undergraduate students)
• Advice for prospective string theory graduate students
• Lecture notes from introductory graduate String Theory course

Stuff other people wrote

• String Theory in the Era of the Large Hadron Collider, by Prof. Michael Dine
• A First Course in String Theory, by Prof. Barton Zwiebach (2nd edition, Cambridge, 2009)
• String Theory (2 volumes) by Prof. Joseph Polchinski (Cambridge, 1998)

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Last updated: 20180512