One reason, at least ...
Historically, the very first hints of string theory came in
1968, when two young researchers at CERN, Gabriel Veneziano and Mahiko Suzuki,
were each looking for mathematical functions that could be used to describe the
behavior of strongly interacting particles.
They each, independently, noticed that a function written down in the
nineteenth century by Leonhard Euler, and called the Euler beta function, might
fit the bill. This turns out to be the
mathematics underpinning string theory; but it was Nambu who turned the
mathematics into physics.
- Footnote found on page 154 of John Gribben’s The Search
for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything
Oh to be those young researchers! Imagine them poring through Euler’s voluminous works, or any of
the voluminous works of the ten or twenty top mathematicians of that era, all the while visualizing real-world outcomes from those esoteric – magical! – formulas and
functions. What did they feel when they
realized that a half-blind court mathematician wrote down an equation that
would, a hundred and fifty years later, describe the behavior of sub-
sub-atomic entities?
The nerd in me is shivering with awe.
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