There was an incredible upwelling of creativity in that era and these two books are the record of it. What’s amazing is that all this came together in such a hurry – a lot of the material in that book is the result of two-and-a half years’ activity. He said in a semester-long undergraduate course they only got halfway through the first volume… Yes, my nephew, who did a masters degree in physics, didn’t recommend it as one to dive into. In terms of readability, I would say even non-physicists could get something out of the first chapter, and then later chapters, they’re more for practitioners. So there was this tremendous light-bulb moment, where everybody said, ‘Oh my God! This could work.’ And that book, Superstring Theory, captures that era in a very substantive way – as well as being a fairly readable account. The notion of string theory was already present, even in the late 1960s, but only in 1984, with the work of Green and Schwarz, did people realise string theory could really be consistent with quantum mechanics, as well as including gravity, and could provide theories that looked very much like the standard model of particles. It was a subject that first fluoresced in the mid-80s.
The two volumes by Green, Schwarz and Witten are a wonderful early account of the subject.
This is pretty technical, isn’t it?Īs a practitioner of the subject I am drawn to the serious accounts. The first book you’ve chosen is Superstring Theory, Vols 1 and 2.
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