I recently attended the Strings 2021 conference! An annual conference, it takes place over a span of two weeks, in a different country across the globe each year, with the pre-eminent names in high-energy physics being invited to speak in front of hundreds of graduate students, postdocs and faculty. It’s always been in-person - until this year. For the first time ever, the Strings conference has been organised online, which meant that participation has shot up sixfold - I was among a handful of high schoolers attending.
I found the presentation system very engaging - it was primarily composed of research talks, where novel research in string theory was described following which the presenter fielded a few questions from the audience at the end. However, there were also longer “review” talks, where recent developments, main features and broader context of a large, active subfield of high energy physics, along with discussion sessions, which commenced with a short presentation but involved questions, comments and discussion later on. How did I decide which ones to watch? Well, it was a combination of spotting some familiar names (Clifford Johnson, Shiraz Minwalla, etc.) and finding topics which were at least slightly familiar to me (offshoots of “traditional” string theory, quantum black holes, amplitudes, supersymmetric gauge theories, etc. ). For their part, the moderators/organisers did a very good job of regulating the discussions (though let me add, the organisers are not some admin people - they included amidst their ranks Nathan Berkovits, creator of the famous pure spinor formalism, and Pedro Vieira, winner of the New Horizons Breakthrough Prize in 2020!).
The research talks were of course too heavy for me at times (I came in fully expecting this), but they were valuable since I previously had no idea what the cutting edge of string theory even looked like, and I learnt of many new interesting models and paradigms. The topics spanned several huge subfields, including “traditional” high-energy string theory, black hole microstates/information, cosmological and condensed matter applications, and it helped put into perspective what I might be working on (and with whom!) if I decide to pursue research in these fields. Another important insight that it provided was in written and spoken academic discourse online (the Slack channels for the conference were continuously active!). I will probably revisit several of the talks to watch them at my own pace with the recent literature in hand, which will probably be even more enlightening.