Tom Levenson hosts Allan Adams, a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of fluid dynamics, quantum field theory and string theory. His latest work uses the physics of black holes to study turbulence in quantum liquids. He is currently working on disorder in many-body systems and pondering the duality between 2d gauge theories and topological 4-manifolds. Adams earned his AB from Harvard, his MA from Berkeley and his PhD from Stanford before spending three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. In 2006, Adams moved to MIT where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and CTP.

Tom notes that Allan, an MIT colleague, is that rarest of rare birds, a string theorist whose work has some connection to the observable world.

We're going to be talking about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, beginning with some recent work of Allan's and then getting a little bit more philosophical...