Superstring theory is one of the most exciting and actively pursued branches of physics today. The far-reaching claims made for this theory would, if correct, provide the much sought-after Theory of Everything, the unification of physics. It would enable the fundamental building blocks of matter to be identified and amalgamated in a common description, with a unified theory of all the forces of nature. This book explains the theory for laymen, in an introduction to the subject which originated in the BBC Radio programme, Desperately Seeking Superstrings. A clear, concise, non-mathematical explanation of the theory and its profound implications is followed by transcripts of interviews with all the most important physicists involved in its development. Superstrings makes a fascinating topic at the forefront of modern scientific research accessible to physicists, philosophers and general readers alike.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough. Niels Bohr Superstring theory has emerged as the most promising candidate for a quan tum theory of all known interactions. Superstrings apparently solve a problem that has defied solution for the past 50 years, namely the unification of the two great fundamental physical theories of the century, quantum field theory and general relativity. Superstring theory introduces an entirely new physical picture into theoretical physics and a new mathematics that has startled even the mathematicians. Ironically, although superstring theory is supposed to provide a unified field theory of the universe, the theory itself often seems like a confused jumble offolklore, random rules of thumb, and intuition. This is because the develop ment of superstring theory has been unlike that of any other theory, such as general relativity, which began with a geometry and an action and later evolved into a quantum theory. Superstring theory, by contrast, has been evolving backward for the past 20 years. It has a bizarre history, beginning with the purely accidental discovery of the quantum theory in 1968 by G. Veneziano and M. Suzuki. Thumbing through old math books, they stumbled by chance on the Beta function, written down in the last century by mathematician Leonhard Euler.

The discovery by Green and Schwarz in 1984 that ten-dimensional superstring theory is anomaly-free and finite only if the Yang-Mills gauge group is SO(32) or E8 x E8 has made the phenomenological possibilities of superstrings evident. Ths has resulted in a sudden surge of interest in superstrings unification. Since this fast-developing field is new to almost all theoretical physicist, this collection of basic pre-1985 references should be very valuable. This two volumes contain over 1000 pages of reprints plus some introductory comments by J Schwarz.

Called by some "the theory of everything," superstrings may solve a problem which has eluded physicists for the past 50 years -- the final unification of the two great theories of the twentieth century, general relativity and quantum field theory. This is a course-tested comprehensive introductory graduate text on superstrings which stresses the most current areas of interest, not covered in other presentation, including: string field theory, multi loops, Teichmueller spaces, conformal field theory, and four-dimensional strings. The book begins with a simple discussion of point particle theory, and uses the Feynman path integral technique to unify the presentation of superstrings. Prerequisites are an aquaintance with quantum mechanics and relativity. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout.

Introduces the superstring theory that attempts to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

This is the first complete account of the construction and finiteness analysis of multi-loop scattering amplitudes for superstrings, and of the guarantee that for certain superstrings (in particular the heterotic one), the symmetries of the theory in the embedding space-time are those of the super-poincar‚ group SP10 and that the multi-loop amplitudes are each finite. The book attempts to be self-contained in its analysis, although it draws on the works of many researchers. It also presents the first complete field theory for such superstrings. As such it demonstrates that gravity can be quantized satisfactorily by superstrings.