String Theory: The Early Years

String theory builds on the great legacy of Yukawa and Tomonaga: New degrees of freedom and control of the UV are two important themes. This talk will give an overview of some of the progress and some of the unsolved problems that characterize string theory today. It is divided into two parts: (1) Connecting String Theory to the Real World; (2) Gauge Theory/String Theory Duality. Two other major subjects, which I will omit, are Black Holes in String Theory and The Impact of S...

In this contribution we go through the developments that in the years 1968 to 1974 led from the Veneziano model to the bosonic string.

This is the written version of a set of introductory lectures on string theory.

These four lectures, addressed to an audience of graduate students in experimental high energy physics, survey some of the basic concepts in string theory. The purpose is to convey a general sense of what string theory is and what it has achieved. Since the characteristic scale of string theory is expected to be close to the Planck scale, the structure of strings probably cannot be probed directly in accelerator experiments. The most accessible experimental implication of sup...

A polemical article evaluating string theory from the point of view of a quantum field theorist working in a mathematics department. Comments to the author are encouraged.

It is hoped that these lectures will give a point of entry into that vast web of related ideas that go under the name "string theory". I start with a more or less qualitative introduction to gravity as a field theory and sketch how one might try to quantize it. Quantizing gravity using the usual techniques of field theory will turn out to be unsuccessful, and that will be a motivation for trying an indirect approach: string theory. I present bosonic string theory, quantize th...

It is argued that string theory may pose new conceptual issues for the history and philosophy of science.

This talk considers possible lessons of string theory for low energy physics. These are of two types. First, assuming that string theory is the correct underlying theory of all interactions, we ask whether there are any generic predictions the theory makes, and we compare the predictions of string theory with those of conventional grand unified theories. Second, string theory offers some possible answers to a number of troubling naturalness questions. These include problems o...

These are the lecture notes of the introductory String Theory course held by one of the authors for the master program of Theoretical Physics at Turin University. The world-sheet approach to String Theory is pedagogically introduced in the framework of the bosonic string and of the superstring.

Invited contribution to the collective book "The Birth of String Theory"