Who are the fathers of string theory?

[Anonymous No.14635654]

Leonard Susskind and Nambu Yoichiro (first proposal as description of hadron)?

or Micheal Green and John Schwarz (anomaly cancellation)?

[Anonymous No.14635671]

doesn't matter, it's stupid and they're all stupid

[Anonymous No.14635712]

>>14635654
Nambu but not susskind imo

[Anonymous No.14635944]

>>14635712
Why do you think like that?

[Anonymous No.14635961]

>>14635654
Gabriele Veneziano

[Anonymous No.14637211]

https://www.quora.com/How-did-string-theory-begin/answer/Ron-Maimon

[Anonymous No.14637402]

>>14637211
Thanks for the link

[Anonymous No.14637650]

great question. Veniziano’s amplitude was proposed in the context of analytic S-matrix theory, and he did not recognize it as describing the scattering of open strings. he had no underlying dynamical model for what was going on (in the tradition of Chew and the bootstrappers, along with crucial input from Dolen-Horn-Schmid who were Gell Mann’s students). so it’s hard to say he started string theory.

Nambu found the string interpretation first and Susskind did the same independently but a little slower. Nambu also was the first to really associate the emerging theory with the lagrangian of a relativistic string, that’s the Nambu-Goto action. which is the most important equation of string theory proper (Witten has said it is his favorite equation of string theory).

now all this was done in the context of the HADRONIC string theory; quite different from the quantum gravity string theory we now talk about. the credit for that goes to Schwarz and Scherk. another important key piece is the superstring, where credit goes to Ramond plus Schwarz and Neveu

so it’s a big puzzle. another person who should really be credited is Mandelstam, who did literally some of the craziest calculations in the early days. David Gross has called him the “Godfather of string theory” because he really beasted string scattering amplitudes and did the crucial step of showing they were renormalizable and finite (finite took decades though but he did it)

another legend is Claud Lovelace who rescued the entire thing by finding the magic “critical dimension” of 26 for bosonic string theory. he kinda was joking but if nobody had thought of going way beyond 4 dimensions then the whole thing would have been inconsistent

Witten and Jona-Lasinio basically had string theory debunked in 83 but the key loophole to save it was done by Schwarz and Green, i mention this because Green deserves a mention. that’s what converted Witten whose guru-ship has led the theory ever since

[Anonymous No.14637685]

>>14637650
>Witten and Jona-Lasinio
sorry i screwed up a name, that should be Witten and Alvarez-Gaume

[Anonymous No.14637702]

>>14637650
OP here. I'm really thankful about this elaborate answer.

BTW, string theory has so many important contributers as you wrote, but it seems that only Witten (+ Maldacena) tend to get mentions.

[Anonymous No.14637711]

>>14635654
Suss Impasta

[Anonymous No.14637765]

>>14637702
i would say that within the field a ton of respect goes to John Schwarz. as you can see he played a part in many of the crucial steps. he also held onto the theory as basically the only guy in America who was productively working on it after it lost all its steam in the period 74-79 (he probably would have lost his job entirely if Murray Gell-Mann hadn’t gotten a special donation from some rich guy’s will to keep Schwarz on an “infinite postdoc” position since Caltech didn’t think Schwarz deserved a faculty position). and seriously, the anomaly cancellation was where Schwarz with Green literally proved Witten wrong and nobody ever proves Witten wrong.

the story there is that Witten, who mostly was focusing on supergravity and kaluza-klein compactifications, noticed that Polyakov (who i didn’t mention but who is important) had put strings back into a small amount of fame after being forgotten for years, and Witten at the time did not like string theory and did the gravitational anomalies calculation to say more or less that “string theory can’t work”. he was not a believer in string theory. but Schwarz and Green who were both actual hardcore believers in string theory blew him the fuck out within a few months. game changer

so Schwarz is like the John The Baptist or like, the Morpheus of string theory. he kept it alive probably more than anyone else.
1/2

[Anonymous No.14637767]

>>14637765
2/2

i think the reason nobody pays him media attention is because back in the 2000s before weed was cool and accepted he wrote some newspaper/magazine articles promoting weed research and medicinal marijuana. i think that just made him fodder for “those string guys are stoners lol” so he is not trotted around at the dog and pony shows for the public like the straight shooters. he also constantly makes jokes and laughs and is kinda not serious enough. and even though he was a grad student with Gross and they shared an office, Gross had the wits about him to work on other topics besides string theory, for which he quickly got a Nobel, but Schwarz was always single-focus on strings, to a fault

he’s also pretty old now and not as active in research as much anymore so nobody is going to recruit him as a fresh face into the scene.