Consider a Spherical Cow with Lara Anderson

So Brian Greene is not the only string theorist in town. I was not aware of this. Lea to Brian. Is there room for another string theorist? At the Okay Corral. Yeah. All updates on string theory and how it connects to mathematics. Multiple branches of it coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Got Chuck Nice with me. How you doing, Chuck? Hey. I'm doing great, man. Alright. A comedian, actor? Yeah. I've seen you a few TV commercials here and there. Yeah. You know, I'm listen. Sometimes I have nothing to do. Okay. Well, today, we've got a really cool topic that's always on everybody's mind. Yeah. Everybody who cares about the universe. You know, even people who don't, but I'll get I'll get into that later. Yep. You know, what we're talking about, I've heard some really weird stuff from people that, you know They wanna get into it. That yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Alright. We're talking today about string theory. Yeah. And then we have our man about town, string theory, it's Brian Greene right up the street. Right. But I said, you know, all the universe is not Brian Greene. You know, he would beg to differ. So I said so we reached out to the cosmos. Yes. Alright. And we found Laura Anderson. Laura, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. So you are associate professor of physics at Virginia Tech. One of our producers is from Virginia Tech. So you're you're right at home here among us. Yeah. We you're family now. Yeah. You're family. Good to be among friends. Also, like Brian Greene, you have a double affiliation also with the mathematics department. I do. I'm an affiliate professor of mathematics, which means I can supervise math grad students as well. Oh, so you just you just taking jobs from everybody. There's professors out on the street because of Laura Anderson. Entirely. In fact. It I I can try to picture that, how they that they're like, I'll saw I'll do your math homework for for for money. Exactly. Will math for food. I think, unfortunately, that is a job. I mean, it's called tutors, really. Right. Exactly. And your research includes I have here the geometry and particle phenomenology in string theory. Oh. So we just want let's just get to the bottom of this. What is string theory? Yes. String theory is an attempt to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity, a theory of gravity, with the formalism of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. So it is a consistent quantum theory of gravity, may not be the way that quantum gravity works in our universe. But at the very least, it's a theoretical playground where we get to ask questions about quantum gravity. You've made an assumption in there …