Gabrielle Veneziano then a fellow at CERN found that particles of the strong
force could be described using the gamma function of Euler's.
No one understood why this worked
This method was then overshodowed with QCD in the 1970's
Why? One reason was that the theory
required the existence of a kind of particle that we didn't want -- namely
a particle with no mass and two units of spin.
Its existence was very
generic and very frustrating.
The second problem was that the theory required that space-time have ten
dimensions (nine space and one time), whereas the correct answer is clearly
our (three space and one time).
In 1970 a physical picture of Veneziano's Method was discovered by Yoichiro
Nambu of the University of Chicago
Yoichiro treated the particles not as zero dimensional
points, but as one dimentional vibrating strings (over time becomes known
as string theory)
1970 John Schwarz finds a way to desribe fermions using string theory
1974 Schwarz and Joel Scherk discover the link between string theory and
gravity - the unwanted paricle of spin 2 and no mass is the graviton!
1976 Scherk shows that fermions and bosons emerge from string theory equally
(for every fermion there is a bosonic partiner and vice-versa)
Supersymmetry
is born!
1980's SUSY is incorperated into strings to produce powerful descriptions
of the universe -> now Superstrings (Scherk dies :-(
The quark model still eclipses
string theory, but a few mathematically incline physisists continue the saga
1980 Schwarz and Green, who started working together in
the 70's, produce Type I theory which dealt with open ended strings
1981 Schwarz and Green introduce Type II theory -deals with closed
strings
Both of these theories require that the strings vibrate in additional dimentions
(10)
1982 Ed Witten shows that Kaluza-Klien compactification will work to compactify
the additional dimensions
1984 Schwarz and Green uncover SO(32) symmetry which, when applied to Type
I, removes all anomalies
David Gross and colleagues produce Heterotic
strings using a different mathematical approach
E8 X E8 symmetry is produced - half of the components
of this symmetry describe everything in our universe
The
other half is a duplicate, which leads to the idea of 2 universes acting on
eachother only through gravity (Dark Matter?)