A brief history about development of String Theories

kiarash_niknejad2003

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References:

1) Green M., Schwarz J., Witten E., Superstring Theory Vol. 1,2, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987
2) S.Klimenko, V.Talanov, I.Nikitin ``Singularities on the world sheets of open relativistic strings'', Preprint IHEP 95-7, (Institute for High Energy Physics, Protvino, Russia, 1995).
3) Introduction to Superstring Theory {http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0008017)
4) "String theory in a nutshell" written by (JM Figueroa-O'Farrill)
{http://www.strings.ph.qmw.ac.uk/WhatIs/Nutshell.html}


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arivero

Good text, excet by the fuzzy concept of "newtonian paradigm". One should clarify why it is a model, why it is from Newton, and how it does realte to strings after all.

Also, I'd like to include the recent (a couple years old by now) ideas of reusing the string in its original context, in QCD, and some more mentions to submilimeter dimensions etc.

notevenwrong

You might also want to find some place in your text to note that string theory makes no predictions and there is not the slightest shred of experimental evidence for it after twenty years of work on the idea.

Or, alternately, you could explain how an increasingly large number of string theorists think that if string theory makes sense, it is completely vacuous, since the "landscape" of its 10^1000 or more solutions can give you any predictions about physics you want.

Nereid

AFAIK there've been quite a few experiments done to look for deviations from inverse square law gravity (for example), down to ~1 micron. Have there been any results other than NULL? What other objectives have sub-mm experiments had?

arivero

Perhaps a goal of submilimeter stuff, but also of Randrall Sundrum etc, was to bring back gradually into reality to the string theoreticians far far away the standard model. At the end the string theory could recover its original rule as a phase of SU(3)...

chroot

We do not condone plagiarism here on physicsforums. If you copy someone else's work, you must provide at least a link to the original, if not a full citation including the author's name.

For reference, the original text is available here:

http://www.strings.ph.qmw.ac.uk/WhatIs/Nutshell.html

and was written by JM Figueroa-O'Farrill.

- Warren