May I ask you which is exactly your (preferred) subfield of work?
My research was in a sense Abbott-like: how a multi-dimensional world would look to someone living in the lower dimensions. It is different from the standard string-theoretical approach of bulk-vs-brain, because it is non-perturbative. I can certainly go into the details of it, but probably not in this comment.
What are the most important open problems in that field that you think could receive decisive insight (both theoretically and experimentally) in the next 10 years?
Caveat: I'm not in academia at this point, so take this with a grain of salt.
Dark energy (not to be confused with Dark matter) is a major outstanding theoretical problem in GR. As it happens, it is also an ultimate existential risk, because it limits the amount of matter available to humanity to "only" a few galaxies, due to the accelerating expansion of the universe. The current puzzle is not that dark energy exists, but why there is so little of it. A model that explains dark energy and makes new predictions might even earn the first ever Nobel prize in theoretical GR, if such predictions are validated.
That the expansion of the universe is accelerating is a relatively new discovery (1998), so there is a non-negligible chance that there will be new insights into the issue on a time frame of decades, rather than, say, centuries.
In observations/experiments, it is likely that gravitational waves will be finally detected. There is also a chance that Hawking radiation will be detected in a laboratory setting from dumb holes or other black-hole analogs.
My research was in a sense Abbott-like: how a multi-dimensional world would look to someone living in the lower dimensions. It is different from the standard string-theoretical approach of bulk-vs-brain, because it isnon-perturbative. I can certainly go into the details of it, but probably not in this comment.
This looks really interesting, any material you can suggest on the subject? I was a particle physics phenomenologist until last year, so proper introductory academic paper should be ok.
...There is also a chance that Hawking radiation will be detecte
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.