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A Brief History of String Theory From Dual Models to M-Theory
Author:
Rickles / Dean
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Springer
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2016
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Berlin;Heidelberg
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Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Dean Rickles A Brief History of String Theory The Frontiers Collection 10.1007/978-3-642-45128-7_1

1. History and Mythology

Dean Rickles 1

(1)

Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Dean Rickles

Email:

The superstring theory has perhaps the weirdest history in the annals of science.

Michio Kaku

1.1 Serendipity and Strings

Gabriele Veneziano is widely heralded as the man that gave birth to string theory in 1968, with the publication of his paper Construction of a Crossing-Symmetric, Regge-Behaved Amplitude for Linearly Rising Trajectories [ Veneziano was interested in the possibility that this duality was a general feature of the strongly interacting world, in which case one ought to see it exhibited within meson-meson processes (albeit initially only in thought experiments). This train of thought was leading (in Venezianos mind) to a bootstrap according to which consistency conditions (on the S-matrix for such processes) would determine what one measures in actual experiments involving mesons.

Veneziano joined together with a team of fellow strong interaction enthusiasts on his journey back to the Weizmann Institute, including Marco Ademollo, from Florence, and Hector Rubinstein and Miguel Virasoro also from the Weizmann Institute.

Though there has been no scholarly historical study of the origins of string theory, as with most scientific theories, there is a mythology surrounding its discovery, repeated over and over again until it becomes firmly entrenched. The standard story one can find in the brief historical passages that appear in the string theory literature recount how in 1968, Gabriele Veneziano, then a mere slip of a student as I mentioned, found entirely by accident a connection between the previously mentioned regularities and desirable properties of hadronic physics, and the Euler beta function. For example, Michio Kaku (himself responsible for some important work in superstring theory) puts it like this:

Thumbing through old mathematics books, they [Veneziano and Mahiko Suzuki] stumbled by chance on the Beta function, written down in the last century by mathematician Leonhard Euler. To their amazement, they discovered that the Beta function satisfied almost all the stringent requirements of the scattering matrix describing particle interactions. Never in the history of physics has an important scientific discovery been made in quite this random fashion [, p. 4].

Veneziano has himself, not without some wry amusement, corrected this particular myth.

What Veneziano (and Suzuki, seeing amongst other things how the Beta function manages to perform this particular feat of representation. Firstly, in this chapter, we give a brief introductory overview of some basic historical and methodological niceties involved in the study of string theory, along with a rough picture of the way the history of string theory will be sliced up in this book. We also present some very elementary physics and mathematics of strings, including a rough guide to the contemporary conception. Finally, to whet the readers appetite, we give a brief preliminary snapshot of string theorys history.

In Part I, Chap. looks at early forms of supersymmetric string theory, in which a cluster of difficult problems (absence of fermions and problems with tachyons) is disposed ofthis also includes a discussion of the so-called zero-slope limit in which the reduction of dual models to standard field theories was explored.

Part II will then take up the story (in Chap. ) its seemingly phoenix-like rise in the form of (anomaly-free) superstring theory, where it was beginning to be widely recognised that the theory potentially offered up a genuinely plausible theory of everything.

Part III begins, in Chap. we end with some speculations on what the future might bring.

1.2 The Four Ages of Strings

String theory was conceived from the union of data from strong interaction scattering experiments and, we will see, the principles of S-matrix theory (together with the resonance-Regge pole duality principle). Ironically, then (given the current critiques based on its dire empirical status), string theory began life as a largely phenomenological endeavour: strongly data-driven. Clearly then, in order to understand where string theory comes from, and why it looks the way it does today, we need to first cover some preliminary ground involving its ancestors in hadronic physics and S-matrix theory (which we attempt in the next chapter).

However, we cannot properly understand the emergence of string theory ( qua theory of everything) without saying something about its curious interaction with pure mathematics, especially the theory of finite simple groups and latticesthis interaction was something that began very early on in the life of string theory and, indeed, it doesnt take long for empirical doubts about dual theory and string theorye.g. claims about pursuing mathematical problems in string theory for their own saketo creep into the history, despite its initially data-driven origins. We will see that much of the strength of string theory flows from its immensely powerful mathematical structure, which can often be found to lie at the root of string theorists trust in their approach. For this reason we devote a considerable amount of space to it. Besides, one cannot properly appreciate string theorys physical claims without also understanding the mathematical structures that support them.

The evolution of string theory can be broken up (periodised) into four broad phases, according to which the beginning of each new phase (aside from the first, which amounts to the origination of the theory) heralds the resolution of some severe problem with the theory (most often some mathematical inconsistency, but also inconsistency with known data resulting in empirical inadequacy):

Phase 1 [19681973]:
- Phase 1A (Exploring Dual Models) [19681969]: the 4-point dual resonance model for hadrons is discovered by Veneziano, quickly generalised to -point amplitudes, factorised, made unitary (with the -loop case considered), and represented in terms of a infinite set of oscillators, which are then given an initial unphysical string interpretation. The Paton-Chan procedure enables isospin factors to be added. The problem of spurious states (ghosts) is revealed in the operator formalism, and quickly resolved via gauge fixing. This introduces a tachyon. Virasoro discovers a second dual model, which faces the same issues as the (generalised) Veneziano model which are (broadly) dealt with in the same way. A split between an abstract operator approach and a more geometrical (string-picture) approach appears. A Feynman diagram approach is introduced, highlighting topological features of dual models.
- Phase 1B (Embryonic String Theory) [19701973]: The problems with dual models are brought into clearer focus, and tackled with great speed. The critical dimension is discovered to be required for consistency of the theory. An action is constructed, based on minimization of string worldsheet area. New fermionic (spin) dual models are constructed, along with the fermion-emission vertex. Adding fermions is seen to have radical implications for the structure of the theory: the critical dimension shifts from 26 to 10, and (part of) the tachyon problem is eradicated. The critical dimension is also given a physical explanation in terms of zero-point energy. The no-ghost theorem is proved. An internally self-consistent quantum theory of a free, massless, relativistic string is constructed and shown to reproduce the physics of dual models. (Externally, this phase also leads to hadronic string theorys development radically slowing down at the hands of several remaining internal difficulties coupled with the rise of quantum chromodynamics. However, the dual models zero slope (low energy) limits of Yang-Mills gauge fields and Einstein gravity were discovered during this phase. There are also attempts to recover QCD-type phenomena from string models.)

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