And Now for Something Completely Different...

(Nota: A partir de ahora tambien estare participando en Astronomers. In the Wild., asi que transcribo mis aportaciones a dicho blog)

A man with string theory up his nose.

As our gracious host has already pointed out, I'm actually a physics student, so it's an honor to be able to write for this fine astronomy blog. In any case I'm beginning to understand the AdS/CFT correspondence, which as you may already know, deals with the apparent duality that exist between some string theories and quantum field theories.
What we can aspire to do with this approach is to investigate quantum field theories without relying on perturbation theory, which limit our understanding of nature. For example, Quantum Cromodynamics (QCD) enjoys asymptotic freedom at high energies, this means that since interactions are weak at those energy scales it's sane to use perturvative methods. However in cases where energy scales are small, we simply do not know how to perform calculations. As always numerical methods are useful to some extent, but even they have a hard time dealing with some situations (they involve dealing with some dynamical quarks, as far as I know). Other option is to study the AdS/CFT correspondence and gather bits of information about gauge theories in general. It all boils down to this: either, A) Find a string theory dual to QCD to be able to make calculations or B) Understand properties about gauge theories in general so you can make predictions about QCD. The second option is more viable and has had success in the past. But I'll explain that some other time.