Download the book A Breif history of String Theory
Extract :
String theory seemingly has a very bizarre early history. In his recent book, on the so-called ‘‘monster sporadic group’’ and its relation to physics (including string theory), Terry Gannon writes of string theory that it ‘‘is still our best hope for a unified theory of everything, and in particular a consistent theory of quantum gravity,’’ but, he continues, ‘‘[i]t goes through periods of boom and periods of bust, not unlike the breathing of a snoring drunk’’. This book describes some of these periods of boom and bust: the snoring drunk. I aim to reveal aspects of string theory’s development in what I hope are more honest terms that the accounts of a pristine, unique, ineluctable structure that form much of the current string theory literature (especially the popular presentations of the theory1). It tells the rather volatile story of string theory from just before its conception, toward the end of the 1960s, when it was bound to so-called ‘‘dual-resonance models’’ (themselves the high-point of Geoffrey Chew’s ‘bootstrap’ approach to strong interaction physics), to the advent of M-theoretic ideas in the mid-1990s, where it isn’t really clear that it is a theory of strings at all. We do face something of a historiographical problem here: in a very real sense, string theory, in the very general sense of a physical framework grounded in a fundamental principle (which delivers the dynamics and physical degrees of freedom) along the lines of the equivalence principle of general relativity, say— does not exist! Instead, we have a strange inversion of the usual relationship between principles and theories according to which one derives the theory from the principles, rather than the other way around. So why write a history of string theory if there is no theory as such to speak of? ....
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A Brief history of String Theory
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