Well, that was something.

Caveat, this is really outside of my field of expertise. The closest reference that I can vaguely relate to in the video is when he says that the AdS/CFT correspondence may have some applicability in condensed matter. This has been discussed in this paper. It's 39 pages long, so no real desire to read it.

Still, it kinda amazes me how far people have applied mathematical theories to try to understand our reality. I'm sure string theory must be fascinating for the ones who study it (including a few old professors in my department), but the fact it cannot be tested, likely ever, pushes it into the realm of intellectual masturbation. I like to think my equations will lead to some practical applications in a near future (10-20 years, maybe, still near future at the scale of how people think in the context of particle physics, e.g. the next-generation LHC plans).

Here, the fact one cannot check if our universe is negatively curved with current tools also makes this whole video very abstract for me. Not only because the math is way outside my field of comfort, but mostly because those are just really abstract ideas.

I'm sure flat-earthers will be able to extract some buzzwords from this to show that their ideas have been confirmed by science~~

Didn't know about the exoteric ideas from Suskind.

Was gonna say, interesting pronunciation of the name 't Hooft, but apparently, that's the phonetic convention in English and Dutch. I always pronounced it without the ə at the beginning.