Turning Point(s)

Abstract

A common myth of string theory has it that string theory was simply ignored until the famous anomaly cancellation result of Green and Schwarz in 1984. This result is said to be the origin of “the first superstring revolution”. It is the goal of this chapter to tame this myth a little, showing that research on the subject was steadily increasing up to 1984, with several important developments between 1981 and 1983, while admitting that there nonetheless considerable truth to the claim that Green and Schwarz?s work triggered a very large increase in the production of papers on the subject, including a related pair of papers (to be discussed in Chapter 9) that between them had the potential to provide the foundation for a realistic unified theory of both particle physics and gravity.