/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10518495
just cope; you can’t be like pic related

the first real inventor of String Theory was Gabriele Veneziano, and it was not meant to be a fundamental theory of everything; instead it was just intended to describe the masses and other properties of mesons (mesons are like protons or neutrons but instead of having 3 quarks, they have 2, and they decay pretty quickly, but they're important for holding the nucleus together). Veniziano's model didn't turn out to be very good at describing mesons. (only a half decade later did the "theory of everything" meme get created by Joel Scherk and Michael Schwarz)

the interesting part is the context. Veniziano's work was following in the footsteps of Tullio Regge, and their approach was very much inspired by Geoffrey Chew, a Berkeley theoretical physicist. Geoffrey Chew, who later became advisor to David Gross (prominent string theorist) who was in tern advisor to Ed Witten. Chew was a big opponent of Quantum Chromodynamics (which ended up being the better theory for mesons) in the early days, because he criticized the idea of "fundamental particles". nowadays we take them for granted, but Chew insisted on rejecting (in his words) "fundamentalism" in physics and instead promoted his idea of "nuclear democracy". his whole persona was really political (he stepped down from his Berkeley professorship because of the "loyalty oath" drama during the cold war/McCarthyism). i think the whole history of string theory is tied up with Chew's personal politics

k im done

zenith confirmed.