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Invited contribution to the collective book "The Birth of String Theory"
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
This article contains a short review of the current status of string theory.
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.
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…
These are my personal impressions of the environment in which string theory was born, and what the important developments affecting my work were during the hadronic string era, 1968-1974. I discuss my motivations and concerns at the time,…
String theory is the most promising candidate theory for a unified description of all fundamental forces exist in the nature. It provides a mathematical framework that combine quantum theory with Einstein's general theory of relativity. But…
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…
This is a completely reformulated presentation of a previous paper with the same title; this time with a much stronger emphasis on conceptual aspects of string theory and a detailed review of its already more than four decades lasting…
An overview of some of the developments in string theory over the past two years is given, focusing on four topics: realistic (standard model like) models from string theory, geometric engineering and theories with fluxes, the gauge…
A personal view is given of the development of string theory out of dual models, including the analysis of the structure of the physical states and the proof of the No-Ghost Theorem, the quantization of the relativistic string, and the…
With the advent of the LHC and the continuing influx of cosmological data, phenomenological aspects of string theory have received renewed attention in recent years and many problems have been properly incorporated in this framework. In…
The talk contains a brief introduction string theory, followed by a discussion of some of the recent developments.
This is an introduction to some recent developments in string theory and M theory. We try to concentrate on the main physical aspects, and often leave more technical details to the original literature.
Using a classical action associated to a point-particle in (1+1)-dimensions the classical string theory is derived. In connection with this result two aspects are clarified: First, the point particle in (1+1)-dimensions is not an ordinary…
We discuss an explicit construction of a string dual for the Gaussian matrix model. Starting from the matrix model and employing Strebel differential techniques we deduce hints about the structure of the dual string. Next, following these…