Since Robert Oppenheimer called the first Shelter island conference in 1947 to consolidate the advances in theoretical physics made during the war and to chart a course for the development of a "pure" physics far removed from defense applications, physics appears once again to have reached a critical juncture. Shelter Island II held at that same remote inn off the Eastern tip of Long Island documents the proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics, calling for a new consolidation and consensus on the directions of future research.
Shelter Island II brings together an international constellation of leading theoreticians, including some of the most intellectually vigorous of the younger physicists and almost all of the living participants in the first conference, a number of them now Nobel laureates. It provides a historical overview and recollections of the first conference, whose proceedings were never published, reviews the major developments in quantum field theory and cosmology over the subsequent 36 years, and identifies the most promising paths for future exploration. A number of the contributions present significant new results. Among the topics discussed are the new inflationary universe scenario, supersymmetry, "The Cosmological Constant Is Probably Zero" (Stephen Hawking), superunification and the seven-sphere, time as a dynamical variable, induced gravity, and an extensive and previously unpublished paper by Edward Witten on KaluzaKlein theories.
The contributors are Stephen L. Adler, Hans Bethe, M. J. Duff, Murray Gell-Mann, Alan. Guth, Stephen W. Hawking, R. Jackiw, Toichiro Kinoshita, W E. Lamb, Jr., T D. Lee, A. D. Linde, R. E. Marshak, Y Nambu, K. Nishijima, John H. Schwarz, Silvan S. Schweber, I. M. Singer, Steven Weinberg, Victor Weisskopf, P. C. West, Edward Witten, and Bruno Zumino.
To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.
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