String Theory and the Real World

Gordon Kane got his PhD at University of Illinois. He joined the University of Michigan in 1965, and became Professor of Physics in 1975. He is now Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor of Physics, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Art and Design. He was Director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics from 2005-2011. In 1971-72 he was a J S Guggenheim Fellow at Rutherford Laboratory and Oxford, in 1986 Scientific Associate at CERN, and in 2007 he was Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fellow of the British Institute for Physics. He was awarded the 2012 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, and co-awarded the 2017 Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society. He was a 2009 Member of the Triennial Committee of Visitors of the National Science Foundation and Chair of its Theoretical Physics Subpanel, and has served on the High Energy Physics and Scientific Advisory Committees at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He originated and co-organized an International Summer School in String Phenomenology, at Simons Center in 2012. Gordon Kane's research has covered several areas of physics beyond the Standard Model(s) of particle physics and cosmology, including supersymmetry, Higgs physics, dark matter, cosmology, collider physics, and string phenomenology. He has published over 200 scientific papers, given over 250 scientific talks, and written or edited ten books. Two are for the general public, in particular Supersymmetry and Beyond, from the Higgs Boson to the New Physics, Basic Books 2013.

Introduction: the Standard Models
The Planck scale—compactification
Testing theories in physics, including string theories
The mass–energy scales of particle physics and cosmology—the 'hierarchy' problem—supersymmetry—hidden sectors
The scales we need to explain
How would we decide we had a good theory to describe and explain our world?
Brief topics: views from our perspective
Perspectives