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News from ICTP 97 - What's New
The Strings 2001 Conference, funded in part by ICTP, again
displayed the intellectual fervour and public fascination driving
one of physics' most exciting theoretical pursuits.
Indian Strings
The Strings 2001 Conference,
held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai,
India, from 5-10 January, was the fifth in an annual series of
string theory conferences devoted to discussions of the latest
developments in the field. What began in the mid-1990s as a small
informal gathering of string theorists has been transformed into
one of the largest and most prestigious gatherings of researchers
in the field.
String theory contends that the universe in its most elemental
form consists not of subatomic particles spotted like dots in
three dimensions but of compressed strings that vibrate in many
dimensions. Those involved in the study of string theory seek
to make Einstein's theory of relativity, which explains the behaviour
of large celestial bodies, compatible with quantum mechanics,
which explains the behaviour of infinitesimally small subatomic
particles. The source of incompatibility between these two pillars
of 20th century theoretical physics lies with gravity, which has
yet to be integrated with the other elementary forces of nature:
the electromagnetic, weak and strong force.
As Edward Witten, who many consider the leading figure of string
theory, observed at the Strings 2001 Conference: "If you
take Einstein's theory of gravity and try to incorporate it into
quantum mechanics, you run into a hopeless mess. String theory
removes this contradiction. Indeed in string theory, quantum gravity
is not just possible but inevitable."
This year's conference attracted 300 string theorists from more
than 125 countries. The conference participant list, which reads
like a 'who's who' in the field, included Edward Witten, Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA; David Gross, Institute of
Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
USA; John Schwarz, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
USA; Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge, UK; Michael Green,
University of Cambridge, UK; Ashoke Sen, Harish-Chandra Research
Institute, India; Michael Douglas, Rutgers University, New Jersey,
USA; Jeffrey Harvey, University of Chicago, USA; and Ignatios
Antoniadis, Ecole Polytechnique, France.
The Strings 2001 Conference was noteworthy on two fronts. First,
it marked the first time that the event was held in a developing
country. Previous meetings took place in Amsterdam (The Netherlands),
Santa Barbara (USA), Potsdam (Germany) and Ann Arbor (USA). Second,
in addition to the technical talks focussing on such cutting-edge
string theory issues as noncommunicative fields theories, tachyon
condensation, and AdS-CFT correspondence (all of which speak to
the behaviour of d-branes), the conference included public presentations
by Gross, "Towards a Theory of Everything;" Hawking,
"The Universe in a Nutshell;" and Witten, "The
Quest for Unification."
The ambitious aim of string theory, which is to unify gravity
with other elementary forces of nature, makes experimental verification
a difficult and challenging problem. The reason is that the theory
can be tested only by examining the behaviour of matter at energies
that existing atom smashers cannot create. Researchers, however,
hope that supersymmetry, which plays a central role in string
theory, can be experimentally tested after the new and more powerful
atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under
construction at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is up and running.
Cosmology is another area that may provide a pathway for experimental
verification of string theory.
The 100 Indian scientists attending the Strings 2001 Conference
are testimony to India's place as a key centre for the study of
string theory. In fact, over the past 15 years, India's theoreticians
have made fundamental contributions to the study of string theory
in black hole physics, strong-weak coupling dualities, and tachyon
condensation and non-BPS branes. The string theory research team
at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which includes
Atish Dabholkar, Sumit Das, Avinash Dhar, Gautam Mandal, Sunil
Mukhi, Sandip Trivedi and Spenta Wadia, is one of the strongest
within a single institution worldwide. The team served as part
of the Strings 2001 Conference organising committee--as did 15
other Indian string theorists working in institutes and universities
throughout the nation.
"Physicists," Witten observes, "have been studying
string theory, trying to understand what is behind the bits and
pieces that have been discovered so far, and wondering how many
more layers of confusion still remain to be peeled away. The theory
doesn't seem to give up its secrets easily."
While this is true, the Strings 2001 Conference with its large
contingent of developing world scientists and the prominent role
played by theorists from India also illustrates that the theory's
secrets are as likely to be unlocked in the South as they are
in North. That makes one of the world's most exotic intellectual
adventures also one of the most international.
Kumar Narain
ICTP High Energy Physics Section