From: Mitchell Porter (mitch@thehub.com.au)
Date: Thu Nov 28 1996 - 23:05:52 MST
Long ago, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> But it has been rather quiet on the string front, I think
> the theory got stuck in mathematics and didn't get to the physical
> side. Still, some results are fascinating.
Actually, it hasn't been quiet at all. Since about October 1995, string
theorists seem to be agreed that all five forms of string theory (bosonic,
Types I, IIa, IIb, heterotic) are different limits of one underlying
theory, "M-theory", which is a theory of interacting _membranes_
(fundamental objects of two or more dimensions) in eleven-dimensional
spacetime.
John Baez wrote a bit about it at
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week72.html
Some preprints:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9609051
"String Theory Dualities", Michael Dine
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9608117
"M-Theory: the theory formerly known as strings", Michael Duff
http://xxx.lanl.gov/hep-th/abs/9607067
"The Second Superstring Revolution", John Schwarz
As for connection to experiment, a lot of papers on string phenomenology
are being written, but the theory doesn't yet have a major predictive
success which it can claim as uniquely its own.
-mitch
http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch
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