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

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