Thomas Israel Banks (born April 19, 1949 in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

) is a theoretical physicist and professor at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

and

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...

Work

Banks' work centers around string theory and its applications to high energy particle physics and cosmology. He received his Ph.D. in

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1973. In 1973-86 he was appointed at the

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

, he was several times a visiting scholar at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

in Princeton (1976–78, 1983–84, and in the fall of 2010). Along with Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and

Leonard Susskind Leonard Susskind (; born June 16, 1940)his 60th birthday was celebrated with a special symposium at Stanford University.in Geoffrey West's introduction, he gives Suskind's current age as 74 and says his birthday was recent. is an American physicis ...

, he is one of the four originators of M(atrix) theory, or BFSS Matrix Theory, an attempt to formulate M theory in a nonperturbative manner. Banks proposed a conjecture known as Asymptotic Darkness - it posits that the physics above the Planck scale is dominated by black hole production. He has often criticized the widely held assumption in the string theory community that background spacetimes with different asymptotics can represent different vacua states of the same theory of quantum gravity. Rather, Banks argues that different asymptotics correspond to different models of quantum gravity. Many of his arguments for this and other ideas are contained in his paper "A Critique of Pure String Theory: Heterodox Opinions of Diverse Dimensions." published in 2003.Banks, To
"A Critique of Pure String Theory: Heterodox Opinions of Diverse Dimensions."
2003.

Notes

External links

M Theory as a Matrix Model: A ConjectureA Critique of Pure String Theory: Heterodox Opinions of Diverse DimensionsTom Banks' Critique of Pure String Theory lecture during Strings 2002 at Cambridge University
21st-century American physicists University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Rutgers University faculty American string theorists Living people 1949 births Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences MIT Department of Physics alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society {{US-physicist-stub