String Theory: The Early Years

This is a brief summary of an introductory lecture for students and scholars in general given by the author at Nambu Memorial Symposium which was held at Osaka City University on September 29, 2015. We review the invention of string theory by Professor Yoichiro Nambu following the discovery of the Veneziano amplitude. We also discuss Professor Nambu's proposal on string theory in the Schild gauge in 1976 which is related to the matrix model of Yang-Mills type.

There have been many remarkable developments in our understanding of superstring theory in the past few years, a period that has been described as ``the second superstring revolution.'' Several of them are discussed here. The presentation is intended primarily for the benefit of nonexperts.

In this article I describe my own stumblings in the first string era. This was a time when most of the active people were very young, not very knowledgeable and the field was completely new. Many of us had little training for what we came to work on, and it took quite some time to accomplish the new conceptual discoveries.

In this article, prepared for the book "The birth of string theory", I recall the sequence of ideas which led to non-critical strings and gauge/strings duality. I also comment on some promising future directions.

String theory is the most promising candidate theory for a unified description of all fundamental forces exist in the nature. It provides a mathematical framework that combine quantum theory with Einstein's general theory of relativity. But due to the extremely small size of strings, nobody has been able to detect it directly in the laboratory till today. In this article, we have presented a general introduction to string theory.

The status of string theory is reviewed, and major recent developments - especially those in going beyond perturbation theory in the string theory and quantum field theory frameworks - are discussed. This analysis helps better understand the role and place of string theory in the modern picture of the physical world. Even though quantum field theory describes a wide range of experimental phenomena, it is emphasized that there are some insurmountable problems inherent in it - ...

We briefly cover the early history of supersymmetry, describe the relation of SUSY quantum field theories to superstring theories and explain why they are considered a likely tool to describe the phenomenology of high energy particle theory beyond the Standard Model.

This is a talk given at YKIS '95, primarily to non-string theorists. I review the evidence for string duality, the principle that any string theory at strong coupling looks like another string theory at weak coupling. A postscript summarizes developments since the conference.

These are lecture notes on string theory at Fudan University.

Introductory Notes in Bosonic String Theory and its Canonical Quantization.