33 - Remembering the dawn of relativistic strings

Summary

In this short account Iwould like to think about the remarkable history of the development of relativistic string theories which have gradually renewed the very foundations of theoretical high energy physics. For lack of time and precise knowledge, Iwill stick tomy own personal contribution at the beginning of this wonderful story, and refer to other contributions in this Volume to complete the picture.

The year 1968–1969, marked a turning point in my career, not only because string theory came into the fore. I was just returning from two years as a postdoc at New York University, where I had met J. Wess (a visitor for one year), B. Zumino (then the head of the Theory Group located at the Courant Institute), K. Symanzik, W. Zimmermann and D. Zwanziger. My earlier interests were mostly on dispersion relations, Regge poles, and S-matrix theory, but at NYU, I had been fully converted to local field theory, and much impressed by the power of symmetries in that context, be they local or global, exact or (spontaneously) broken. Of course, this year saw the beginning of string theory, which was however initially developed using the covariant operator method within the context of S-matrix theory, giving what looked like a realization of G. Chew's programme. I refer to the contribution of Ademollo to this Volume for a review of the precursory works which led Veneziano to write his celebrated four-point function.