Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Photographs of contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Part I Overview
- EARLY STRING THEORY
- Part II The prehistory: the analytic S-matrix
- Part III The Dual Resonance Model
- 10 Introduction to Part III
- 11 From the S-matrix to string theory
- 12 Reminiscence on the birth of string theory
- 13 Personal recollections
- 15 Early string theory at Fermilab and Rutgers
- 15 Dual amplitudes in higher dimensions: a personal view
- 16 Personal recollections on dual models
- 17 Remembering the ‘supergroup’ collaboration
- 18 The ‘3-Reggeon vertex’
- Part IV The string
- TOWARDS MODERN STRING THEORY
- Part V Beyond the bosonic string
- Part VI The superstring
- Part VII Preparing the string renaissance
- Appendix A Theoretical tools of the Sixties
- Appendix B The Veneziano amplitude
- Appendix C From the string action to the Dual Resonance Model
- Appendix D World-sheet and target-space supersymmetry
- Appendix E The field theory limit
- Index
13 - Personal recollections
from Part III - The Dual Resonance Model
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Photographs of contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Part I Overview
- EARLY STRING THEORY
- Part II The prehistory: the analytic S-matrix
- Part III The Dual Resonance Model
- 10 Introduction to Part III
- 11 From the S-matrix to string theory
- 12 Reminiscence on the birth of string theory
- 13 Personal recollections
- 15 Early string theory at Fermilab and Rutgers
- 15 Dual amplitudes in higher dimensions: a personal view
- 16 Personal recollections on dual models
- 17 Remembering the ‘supergroup’ collaboration
- 18 The ‘3-Reggeon vertex’
- Part IV The string
- TOWARDS MODERN STRING THEORY
- Part V Beyond the bosonic string
- Part VI The superstring
- Part VII Preparing the string renaissance
- Appendix A Theoretical tools of the Sixties
- Appendix B The Veneziano amplitude
- Appendix C From the string action to the Dual Resonance Model
- Appendix D World-sheet and target-space supersymmetry
- Appendix E The field theory limit
- Index
Summary
String theory was born under the guise of a dual scattering amplitude in the strong interaction community. I still remember the very young Gabriele Veneziano dropping into my office at CERN in 1968 to show me his beta function as an expression for an s-t dual scattering amplitude with only poles (bound states) in both channels and only Regge pole asymptotic behaviours. It looked to me an amusing mathematical realization of an idea that several groups were pursuing. But, I confess, I did not follow the general enthusiasm met by the function as well as its extentions to more particle amplitudes.
The revelation on the road to Damascus, and my subsequent conversion, came to me through the Fubini–Gordon–Veneziano paper in which dual amplitudes were factorized in terms of a well-defined – albeit infinite – set of operators. This implied an operatorial expression for tree diagrams thus ready to be extended so to produce the loop expansion as usually required by unitarity: a process that converted an expression for scattering amplitudes into a perturbative expansion of a full fledged field theory.
At that time, I was spending a sabbatical at Orsay and it took us little time to compute, with Claude Bouchiat and Jean-Loup Gervais, the first loop dual amplitude – and also to infect with enthusiasm for the new theory two bright students who were at the edge of getting their degrees and sailing to Princeton: André Neveu and Joël Scherk.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Birth of String Theory , pp. 191 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012