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this is a page containing a single section, meant to be !included as a section of AdC/CFT duality, AdS/QCD duality, open/closed string duality and, last not least, of a stand-alone entry Polyakov gauge-string duality which I’ll create in a moment.
(Notice that in its references-anchors this page here assumes that also the page Polyakov gauge-string duality – references has been !included.)
The intent of this section is to bring out some of ideas of one of the “founding fathers” of string theory which one can easily image would be much more famous were it not for quirks of scientific history.
Where I developed the text in this page in the Sandbox it has another opening. It is probably wise not to include this in the nLab entry, but I’ll drop it here:
— alternative lead-in —
The biggest threat to a good idea are often its proponents, or those who vocally appear to be.
String theory originated in the 1960s as a conceptual strategy for understanding experimental observations about strongly-interacting fundamental particles, notably the confinement of “quarks” inside hadrons and the “Regge trajectories” seen in hadron scattering. These are experimental phenomena exhibited by fairly ordinary matter (all atomic nuclei are bound states of hadrons), and yet (despite frequent advertisement of the success of the standard model of particle physics) understanding them properly remains an open problem to this day, to the extent that one speaks of a “Millennium Problem”.
However, 5 decades of intellectual twists and sociological turns later, mainstream string theorists as a swarm community largely forgot about the glaring question why quarks are never seen in isolation and somehow ended up, in the 2000s, instead convincing themselves and the public that string theory’s prime contribution to physics is to suggest the imminent detection of “squarks” at the LHC-experiment commencing in 2010. The failure of this alleged prediction to materialize is increasingly leading to the sensation of a failure of “string theory”.
In reality, this should be a chance to go back to the roots and re-assess string theory as a candidate for the elusive theory of strongly-interacting matter systems, both in high energy physics — concerning quantum hadrodynamics in QCD — as well as in solid-state physics — notably concerning topologically ordered quantum materials —, both reflected in a “mass gap” and both related to quantum gravity via holography in the original sense of Alexander Polyakov’s gauge/string duality.
This is the role of string theory that Alexander Polyakov originally envisioned (following observations notably by Leonard Susskind and Kenneth Wilson) under the name gauge-string duality, long before the community came back full circle to this idea with what is now known as AdS/CFT duality and holographic QCD (see further comments below).
The logic here proceeds in the following steps…
— end of alternative lead-in —
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