Brian Greene is a distinguished researcher, and he was the first to make an all-out effort to really connect to the public with the main ideas of modern string theory. This is a really popular account, probably more in line with what you were expecting. On the subject of elegance, what about your next choice, The Elegant Universe? These are some of the ideas that Polchinski brought into the field, through his research papers, and he captured those ideas in his book in an elegant and very systematic way.
D-branes are a big part of my own book on string theory, and they are objects like strings in that they have spatial extent but they’re much heavier than strings. And that is where Polchinski made his own greatest contribution, which goes by name of the D-brane. They had to do with dimensions of space and time emerging from dynamics, and with new objects, other than strings, entered into the story. Those ideas had a more geometrical flavour. People had taken the notions from the Green, Schwarz, Witten textbook (and the many papers on which it was based) as far as they were going to go, and it seemed that some really new ideas were needed. It includes the key early ideas of what’s known as the second superstring revolution. It is a work of tremendous care and detail, but it doesn’t quite have that quality of Green, Schwarz, Witten of being the instant classic. He also retains an impressive website where he’s caught all the errors in the equations, and corrected them. It’s something which he spent years writing and refining, so it’s this gorgeously edited and refined book. Polchinki’s book stands as a very different achievement. Yes, what about going on to the Polchinski book, String Theory, Vols 1 and 2? If we compare it, for example, to Polchinski’s book, another great account – in fact the one that I have used myself the most… It was a book very much of the moment, and yet a classic – the words instant classic spring to mind. There is something unusual and special about Green, Schwarz, Witten. You told me you put your books in order, does this mean this is your favourite? There must be parallels in other fields, where you have some solid contribution that really pushes the field forward in a remarkable way… It really hastened the development of the field for a while. But that indicated that it was indeed part of a quickly evolving field, and captured what was going on in a really compelling way. John Schwarz once remarked to me that the things he most regrets having left out of that pair of books were the developments that happened shortly after they published it. It isn’t out of date just because it dates a while back now? It must be a quickly evolving field. 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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