43 - From strings to superstrings: a personal perspective

Summary

Abstract

This Chapter gives an overview of my period of research in string theory up to the end of 1984. I will begin with my time as a graduate student and postdoc, which coincided with the earliest developments in dual models and string theory. However, I will not repeat the detailed history of this early period, which is covered much more completely by other authors in this Volume. The second part will concern the development of string theory with manifest spacetime supersymmetry in the late Seventies and early Eighties, a period that postdates most of the other contributions in this Volume.

String theory till 1979

The subject of string theory has its genesis in the many wonderful developments in relativity and quantum theory in the first half of the twentieth century. Two singular results of the early to mid-Sixties are particularly relevant to subsequent developments in string theory. One of these was the formulation by Dirac of a theory of the relativistic membrane [Dir62] (eight years before the formulation of the relativistic string, Nambu and Goto [Nam70, Got71]), in which he attempted to describe the μ-meson as a radial excitation of a spherical membrane whose ground state was the electron. This inspired paper was effectively ignored until the subject of supermembranes became fashionable in the late Eighties. It now plays a key role, in association with Born and Infeld's long-neglected nonlinear electrodynamics [BI34], in the Dirac–Born–Infeld description of D-branes. A second important insight of the mid-Sixties was Hagedorn's implementation of the bootstrap programme.