From what I get they managed to vastly simplify calculations of super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory by representing results as volumes of geometric object.
Super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory is not shown to represent reality (yet?) but they hope they can use similar method to simplify calculations of the quantum field theories that are currently believed to represent reality.
It's worse than that--- N=4SYM is known not to represent reality. However, it has some features that make calculations particularly easy to do. The analogous calculations are doable for other theories, but are trickier. So they've done the simplest example with this new framework.
Comments
From what I get they managed to vastly simplify calculations of super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory by representing results as volumes of geometric object.
Super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory is not shown to represent reality (yet?) but they hope they can use similar method to simplify calculations of the quantum field theories that are currently believed to represent reality.
It's worse than that--- N=4SYM is known not to represent reality. However, it has some features that make calculations particularly easy to do. The analogous calculations are doable for other theories, but are trickier. So they've done the simplest example with this new framework.