ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Gravity in the Wake of the Standard Model: Dual String Theory, Supergravity, and Unification

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives on Histories of Gravity and Mass 3

English Abstract

We examine how elementary-particle physicists established a practice of unified theory construction in which the incorporation of gravity was a central tenet. This development was rooted in the perceived success of the Standard Model in the 1970s, which stimulated (or required) theorists to pursue new goals, one of which was unification.
We will discuss two lines of research that would increasingly get mixed up. Prominently, particle physicists sought to unify on the basis of the gauge-theoretic framework of the new Standard Model. Through making supersymmetry (a new spacetime symmetry) a local gauge symmetry, this among others led to the construction of supergravity: the supersymmetric extension of general relativity. Unrelatedly, a small group of particle theorists proposed to reinterpret dual string models, which were originally developed attempting to find a theory for strongly-interacting particles, as a unified theory with gravity. When suitably rescaled, the theory described a massless spin-2 boson that could be identified as a graviton. While this approach was not widely pursued at first, it was influential in an indirect manner: in particular, dual string theorists revived the old approach of Kaluza-Klein compactification as a means to unify gauge theory with gravity.
In the early 1980s, a wide group of particle theorists was working in a framework that combined these different elements. Out of this practice, superstring theory eventually emerged as a dominant approach for the unification of quantum theory and gravity. The picture presented here challenges the view, common in popular descriptions, that the rise of superstring theory was a sudden landmark shift (the “first superstring revolution”) in the mid-1980s. While accurate in terms of a rise of practitioners per se, we show that superstring theory’s rise to prominence was strongly dependent upon a decade of particle physicists’ efforts in constructing unified theories of elementary particles and gravity.

Author

• Robert van Leeuwen, University of Amsterdam