Related papers: Reminiscence on the Birth of String Theory
This article surveys some of the highlights in the development of string theory through the first superstring revolution in 1984. The emphasis is on topics in which the author was involved, especially the observation that critical string…
I worked on String Theory over a period of five years during the First String Era, the most intellectually satisfying years of my scientific life. One of the early prospectors in the String Theory Mine, I was fortunate enough to contribute…
Invited contribution to the collective book "The Birth of String Theory"
The first part of this report gives a very quick sketch of how string theory concepts originated and evolved during its first 25 years (1968-93). The second part presents a somewhat more detailed discussion of the highlights of the past…
In this contribution we go through the developments that in the years 1968 to 1974 led from the Veneziano model to the bosonic string.
I discuss the early developments of string theory with respect to its connection with gauge theory and general relativity from my own perspective. The period covered is mainly from 1969 to 1974, during which I became involved in research on…
These notes on string theory are based on a series of talks I gave during my graduate studies. As the talks, this introductory essay is intended for young students and non-string theory physicists.
Lenny Susskind has made many important contributions to theoretical physics during the past 35 years. In this talk I will discuss the early history of string theory (1968-72) emphasizing Susskind's contributions.
This lecture presents a brief overview of the early history of string theory and supersymmetry. It describes how the S-matrix theory program for understanding the strong nuclear force evolved into superstring theory, which is a promising…
String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that…
In this article, prepared for the book "The birth of string theory", I recall the sequence of ideas which led to non-critical strings and gauge/strings duality. I also comment on some promising future directions.
This is an invited contribution to the Special Issue of "Foundations of Physics" titled "Forty Years Of String Theory: Reflecting On the Foundations". I have been asked to assess string theory as an outsider, and to compare it with the…
The early history of string theory is marked by a shift from strong interaction physics to quantum gravity. The first string models and associated theoretical framework were formulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the…
In the 1950's Wigner and collaborators provided an explanation for the spectrum of hadronic excitations in terms of Random Matrix Theory. In the 1980's it was understood that some hadronic spectral properties were generic to systems whose…
This is a short account, based on a talk given at the 2024 Moriond Cosmology Conference, of where and why string theory matters in early universe cosmology. It is written for a cosmology audience predisposed to be at best sceptical, and at…
String Theory is a hot topic of physics and mathematics. For the former, it stands as a huge sandbox where the formulation of difficult problems can be simplified and their hard computations carried out. For the latter, it stands as a…
There have been many remarkable developments in our understanding of superstring theory in the past few years, a period that has been described as ``the second superstring revolution.'' Several of them are discussed here. The presentation…
These notes are based on lectures given by Michael Green during Part III of the Mathematics Tripos (the Certificate for Advanced Study in Mathematics) in the Spring of 2003. The course provided an introduction to string theory, focussing on…
In this note we follow the historical development of the ideas that led to the formulation of String Theory. We start from the inspired guess of Veneziano and its extension to the scattering of $N$ scalar particles, then we describe how the…
The first quantum string theories were developed around 1970, prior to the discovery of QCD, with the goal of producing a theory of hadrons. Basic physical requirements and mathematical consistency of the string theories known at that time…