A brief history of string theory. From dual models to M-theory (Q384799): Difference between revisions

It may seem that string theory is a cutting-edge attempt to unify all the elementary interactions, in particular gravity with quantum field theories, that has only recently emerged out of her cradle. The theory has perhaps only captured the public imagination in the last decade or so, and one often forgets that there has been more than half a century of intellectual development, initially inspired by vast experimental data, maturing to revolutionize pure mathematics and theoretical physics alike, and gazing toward future experimental verification. Indeed, \textit{J. Schwarz}, a founding father of the field, commented in [``The early history of string theory: A personal perspective'', \url{arXiv:0708.1917}] that there seems a want of interest from the history of science community, bemoaning that ``\dots [since this community] has shown little interest in string theory, it is important to get this material on the record. There have been popular books about string theory and related topics, which serve a useful purpose, but there remains a need for a more scholarly study of the origins and history of string theory''. The present volume by Dean Rickles aims to precisely address this desire to set the material on record, in a most readable and entertaining way. The intended readership is a wide and ambitious one, as Rickles provides in his ``bespoke reader's notes'' in the Preface, reaching for (1) the general audience, (2) historians and sociologists of science, (3) philosophers of science, (4) mathematicians and (5) physicists. Though perhaps overwhelmingly technical at times for a non-specialist, wherein a noble effort has been made to include many of the key equations and details, the book provides a wonderful overview for the practitioner, in grasping a comprehensive glance at the field. Rickles divides the history of string theory into four ages: (I) 1968--73, which began with the urgent need to study the plethora of hadrons arising from experiment, culminating in the Veneziano amplitude and the Ramond-Neveu-Schwarz model for supersymmetry; (II) 1974--83, a period of relative ``darkness'' (though the author points that this is somewhat of a misnomer since during this period much of the theoretical foundations were laid), beginning with QCD taking over as the correct description for hadrons but elevating to the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation of super-strings as a potential theory of quantum gravity; (III) 1984--94, the age of phenomenology, focusing on how especially the compactification of heterotic string theory gave the hope of getting low-energy real-world physics from the unified theory in 10 dimensions; and (IV) 1995-, the present age, propelled by D-branes, duality and holography (AdS/CFT). Throughout, Rickles gives a vivid account, rich with anecdotes, mostly obtained from direct interviews, and some from secondary sources, photocopies of letters exchanged between some key figures, as well as diagrams or pages from original research articles for those interested in the technicalities, whereby fully illustrating the dynamical evolution which superstring theory had undergone. Especially interesting are the various histograms of the number of papers and citations on certain topics versus time period. These provide a nice visualization of the development of the field. In a very positive response to some criticism which string theory has received of late regarding its seeming detachment from experimental verification, there is a constant underlying thread emphasizing how the theory grew from a necessity to explain experimental data and how the theory has revolutionized modern mathematics in more than one way. From the perspective of the philosophy of science, Rickles quotes \textit{P. Galison}'s essay [``Theory bound and unbound: Superstrings and experiments'','in: Laws of nature: Essays on the philosophical, scientific and historical dimensions. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1996)], that the \textit{extra-emperical} constraints in string theory are ``a profound and contested shift in the position of theory in physics''. As Rickles summarizes well in his concluding remarks, the book is intended to be ``a little more of the history of string theory than is usually presented'', and that ``while the mythological presentations of `revolutions' and `dark years'\dots make a good story, a more accurate depiction\dots reveals a somewhat less turbulent lifestory''. The optimism that the history of string theory is ``a perfectly rational sequence of events, not so very different locally from any other area of physics'' and that ``the potential payoff is so large that it makes the risk of its being a dead end worth taking'' is invigorating indeed. A beginner student, while labouring over the standard texts such as Green-Schwarz-Witten, Polchinski or Zwiebach, would find this book a charming and sanguine companion.