STRING FIELD THEORY

The theories of physics available to us present a reality in which everything is composed of atoms and subatomic particles.  These include electrons that orbit a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, themselves consisting of smaller particles known as quarks.  String Theory uncovers an even smaller level, that of quarks. 

String Theory began to take shape around 1968, when Gabriele Veneciano stumbled upon a set of equations in a two-hundred-year old book by the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler.  Considered for many years as nothing more than a mathematical curiosity, these equations seemed to describe strong nuclear force.  Later, Leonard Susskind, after studying Euler’s equations, discovered something else.  He saw that the equations described a species of particle with a vibrating internal structure, whose behavior was not limited to a precise particle, and deduced that what he was dealing with was a string.  Susskind wrote his findings up in an article and sent the paper to a group of experts, but the discovery was ignored.       

The recently born String Theory, it seemed, stood in the shadow of the physicists who had developed the standard theoretical model.  This model, developed between 1970 and 1973, unified electromagnetism with strong and weak nuclear forces, three of the four forces, yet left gravity out.

In 1973, String Theory started gaining ground once again.  At a time when only a few people were still working on it, John Schwartz continued trying to elucidate its mysteries.  The theory described a particle without mass that had yet to be found, in addition to being rife with mathematical anomalies and incongruities.  Schwartz thought that perhaps he was dealing with a theory of gravity and that the particle without mass that he was trying to free himself of was the graviton, which transmitted gravity at the quantum level.  He had hit upon the piece of the puzzle missing from the standard model, but there was still a long way to go.  Schwartz sent another article to the scientific community for review, and again it was roundly rejected.     

At the beginning of the 1980s, the theory was still hampered by mathematical anomalies that needed to be solved.  Schwartz and Michael B. Green wrestled with these aberrations until, in 1984, they had reduced everything to a single calculation.  When squared, the calculation released String Theory from all mathematical inconsistencies.  This time, when Schwartz and Green sent the article to the scientific community, the reaction was magnificent.  In just a year, the number of defenders of String Theory had jumped from several to several hundreds.   

The other problematic factor was that of additional dimensions.  To get a better grasp of this, we must look back to the year 1919.  It was then when Theodore Kaluza, rewriting Einsteinian theory by using five dimensions instead of four, introduced the additional dimension of space.  By adding this fifth dimension, Kaluza had neatly unified light, or Maxwellian electromagnetism, and gravity.  Light was now seen as vibrations in the fifth dimension.  In five dimensions there is “enough space” to unify light and gravity.  Kaluza sent his theory of an additional dimension to Einstein.  At first Einstein seemed interested, yet it was two years before he published an article on it.