Related papers: A critical look at strings
On the occasion of the celebration of the first half-century of Yang--Mills theories, I am contributing a personal recollection of how the subject, in its early times, confronted physical reality, that is, its "phenomenology". There is…
Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…
These notes provide a brief introduction to modern cosmology, focusing primarily on theoretical issues. Some attention is paid to aspects of potential interest to students of string theory, on both sides of the two-way street of…
A review article on string tension concept and their relevance as non-perturbative quantity on the study of quark confinement in lattice gauge theories. A detailed description of a variety of methods to measure the string tension on the…
Ideas about a duality between gauge fields and strings have been around for many decades. During the last ten years, these ideas have taken a much more concrete mathematical form. String descriptions of the strongly coupled dynamics of…
The aim of this paper is to explain carefully the arguments behind the assertion that the correct quantum theory of gravity must be background independent. We begin by recounting how the debate over whether quantum gravity must be…
The subject matter of these lecture notes is the open bosonic critical string, its perturbative spectrum and interactions. We begin with a brief review of classical string propagation, quantization, as well as the level-by-level…
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 these lectures I review recent attempts to apply string theory to cosmology, including string cosmology and various models of brane cosmology. In addition, the review includes an introduction to inflation as well as a discussion of…
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…
This Ph.D. thesis collects results obtained investigating two different aspects of modern unifying theories. In the first part I summarized results achieved investigating simplicial aspects of string dualities. Exploiting Boundary Conformal…
An overview is presented of some cosmological aspects of string theory. Recent developments are emphasised, especially the attempts to derive inflation or alternatives to inflation from the dynamics of branes in string theory. Time…
We present an overview of a theory of complex dimensions of self-similar fractal strings, and compare this theory to the theory of varieties over a finite field from the geometric and the dynamical point of view. Then we combine the several…
This lecture surveys a few loosely related topics, ranging from the scarcity of quantum field theories -- and the role that this has played, and still plays, in physics -- to paradoxes involving black holes in soluble two dimensional string…
I describe our understanding of physics near the planck length, in particular the great progress of the last four years in string theory. Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum…
We review aspects of spacetime singularities from the view point of string theory. Examples considered include cosmological, cosmic string and black-hole singularities. We also discuss the consistency of viewing black-holes as excited…
We give a mathematical perspective on string compactifications. Submitted as a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics.
String (membrane) theory could be considered as degenerate case of relativistic continuous media theory. The paper presents models of media, which are continuous distributions of interacting membranes, strings or particles.
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…
Motivated by issues in string theory and M-theory, we provide a pedestrian introduction to automorphic forms and theta series, emphasizing examples rather than generality.