A Physics Writer Tried to Ignore AdS/CFT. She Couldn't.

Physics greets newcomers with strings of capital letters, and Quanta Magazine's writer remembers meeting one in her first months on the beat nearly a decade ago: AdS/CFT. Her first instinct was to ignore it. She couldn't keep that up for long, she writes — the acronym was too magnetic to keep her head in the sand indefinitely. Jargon is often accused of gatekeeping, and often it is. This kind compresses a surprising claim into four characters: a connection between two frameworks that look as though they should have nothing to do with each other, gravity and quantum mechanics. The letters look like a password. The idea behind them proposes that the very large and the very small are not as separate as their theories suggest — which is either efficiency or intimidation, depending on how much coffee you've had.