Interview with Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Maldacena recounts his childhood in Buenos Aires, he discusses his undergraduate education at the University of Buenos Aires and his advanced work in physics at Instituto Balseiro where he had his initial exposure to string theory. He explains his decision to pursue a graduate degree at Princeton where he worked with Curt Callan and where he benefited from Ed Witten’s lectures on dualities in quantum field theory and in string theory. Maldacena describes his thesis research on conformal field theories with boundaries and the significance of Joe Polchinski’s discovery of D-branes, and he conveys the importance of his collaboration with Andy Strominger as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers. He describes his paper on AdS/CFT while at Harvard and he explains his work on non-gaussianities and his realization that string theory would be useful for cosmology. Maldacena explains his decision to leave the faculty at Harvard to join the Institute, and he describes his subsequent research on space-time and entanglement, the chaos of black holes and the likelihood that they are rapidly thermalizing systems. He explains the contributions of string theory research as offering physics a model for quantum gravity and for the quantum mechanics of spacetime itself, and he shares his perspective on broader debates about how many researchers should or should not be involved in string theory work. At the end of the interview, Maldacena describes his hope in the future to better understand the interiors of black holes.
