"On notable classmate was Dan Friedan. Friedan stunned me, and I think everyone else, at his Ph.D. seminar, when he showed that Einstein's equation, the basic equation of general relativity, could be interpreted in terms of one of the basic objects in QFT, the β function that governs the energy scale. I did not see what this could possibly mean, but a few years later it showed up as one of the key ideas in string theory."
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Academics from the United StatesPeople from New York CityPhysicists from the United StatesUniversity of California, Berkeley alumniCalifornia Institute of Technology alumni
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Polchinski
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Joseph Polchinski
Joseph Polchinski (16 May 1954 – 2 February 2018) was an American physicist, one of three winners of the 2017 Fundamental Prize. He is known for his research on D-branes.
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