Trying to understand string theory but ending up with your brain in knots? Here's your lifeline! This straightforward guide explains the fundamental principles behind this cutting-edge concept.
String Theory Demystified elucidates the goal of the theory--to combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single, unified framework. You'll learn about classical strings, conformal field theory, quantization, compactification, and T duality. The book covers supersymmetry and superstrings, D-branes, the holographic principle, and cosmology. Hundreds of examples and illustrations make it easy to understand the material, and end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam help reinforce learning.
This fast and easy guide offers:
Numerous figures to illustrate key concepts
Sample problems with worked solutions
Coverage of equations of motion, the energy-momentum tensor, and conserved currents
A discussion of the Randall-Sundrum model
A time-saving approach to performing better on an exam or at work
Simple enough for a beginner, but challenging enough for an advanced student, String Theory Demystified is your key to comprehending this theory of everything.
A playful yet serious textbook on string theory I actually love the book, its format, and its focus. Imagine that your task is to take Polchinski's textbook on String Theory and compress both volumes to 320 light pages or so.
You have to include some basics of GR, QFT, abstract classical mechanics but also the CFTs, bosonic strings, light cone gauge, T-duality, symmetries, RNS superstring, heterotic strings, D-branes, AdS/CFT, black holes. But you also add some material that was not yet fully covered in Polchinski's book such as tachyon condensation on D-branes and the speculative field of string cosmology, among others.
I think that if you realize your task well, you will end up with a book very similar to McMahon's book. As a kid or undergrad, I would actually love the playful format of the book, the icons and big headlines. In fact, I like it even now. It's the format that succeeds to attract the reader's attention and give him or her the (semi-realistic) feeling that the knowledge needed to fully master string theory is of encyclopedic character and "learnable" in a finite time.
Although the brevity of many explanations will clearly make it insufficient for all readers to understand the true origin of all results and steps, this is a book focusing on real, solid scientific arguments.
This is a simplified but technical, not popular, book that won't overwhelm you with postmodern philosophical babbling, trying to convince you that it can replace the calculations and lead you instantly to "big" conclusions without any hard work. It is a book that shows the actual correct calculations and derivations, albeit in a simplified form. Most importantly, the answers are pretty much universally correct, as far as I could check, and they uniformly cover the basic topics that are important for actual researchers in modern high-energy theoretical physics.
If you're a college student, high school student, or a mathematically skilled "semi-outsider" who is bright enough to learn advanced theoretical physics, please ignore the other reviewers who clearly have no idea what theoretical physics actually is, and buy this book. You may like it, too.
Not what I expected... I have just about every book about string theory and theoretical physics written for the lay person- Kaku, Greene, Randall, Smolin, Tyson, Hawking, Feynam, etc.
These books all avoid the complicated math and get to the heart of the theories. I thought this book would be a good introduction to getting into a bit of math... BOY WAS I WRONG.
You pretty much have to be up to speed on all the math to use this book. There is no introduction to calculus or differential equations... what the author does is writes sentences between long equations such as "It follows that" or "and so" without breaking down the origins or introducing the concepts.
Perhaps I was expecting a different book, so I gave him an extra star in case I was at fault. But I was expecting a book that would introduce the layperson to the math involved in String Theory. Instead what I got was a book that requires you know everything about advanced math (and perhaps nothing about how that math applies to String Theory). The author kindly suggests his several other Demystified books if you're rusty in the math.
Very disappointing The most challenging part of string theory for those who want to learn it is not the routine calculations and "index gymnastics" that is found in this book but rather the essential meaning and "intuition" behind the mathematics of the theory. As physical theories go, string theory makes unprecedented use of very complicated and esoteric mathematics, coming from fields such as algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, and the theory of several complex variables. The cover of this book promises that the reader will be able to understand the mathematical tools necessary to "decipher" string theory, but it does not make good on these promises.
What the book does rather well is to introduce the reader well versed in relativistic quantum field theory to string theory as it was articulated in the first two decades of its discovery as a theory. Yes, the author does discuss more modern topics in string theory such as D-branes, Chan-Paton indices, the Ads/CFT correspondence, and the holographic principle, but he does so in a manner that does not shed light on the formidable mathematics behind these concepts. The treatment is very cursory and does not prepare the reader for meaningful perusal of the research literature.
There is no discussion for example on the mathematics of Calabi-Yau manifolds, and the accompanying notions of holonomy, mirror symmetry, and orbifolds. There is no in-depth discussion on how non-Abelian gauge symmetries are incorporated into string theory other than what is done in one chapter on heterotic string theory. There is no discussion at all on how to use K-theory to classify D-brane charges. Yes, these are all complex mathematical topics, but it is THESE topics that cause problems for students or those curious about string theory, especially those that are teaching themselves, a readership that this book was supposedly written to target.
This reviewer recommends the book by Becker, Becker, and Schwarz as the best one for addressing some of the "intuition" behind the mathematics of string theory. To get a deep appreciation of this mathematics though will require years of study and searching in the original mathematical literature, some of this going back over a century. It is well worth the time and effort, even if one does not intend to conduct original research in string theory, but instead is passionately curious about what could in terms of its mathematics alone be easily described as the most beautiful theory ever constructed.
A Definite Improvement over Others in this Series As one of the reviewers who has criticized many of the others in the Demystified series, I wanted desperately this time to find something good I could say about the current volume. And although there is "different news" to report on this volume, it too still is not always good.
To his credit this time around, the author does make a heroic effort to put some order to an otherwise complex and disorderly subject matter. There is however, just much too much going on to treat String Theory casually and sophomorically. At every stage it seems to require "in-depth" analysis as well as "in-depth" explanations. So, I appreciate the challenge he was up against.
I believe this time the author has done the "in-depth" analysis much more thoroughly than in the previous difficult topics in this series. However, he did not help his cause when he cited his own previously failed efforts as a reference for difficult to understand things such as Quantum Mechanics and QED.
One of the problems is that he has repeatedly failed to invest sufficient explanatory time "up front," leaving too much of the "demystifying process" to the later mathematical equations, which for the most part, are the exact opposite of demystification. The reader expects to be "demystified" rather than "further mystified" and therefore should not be required to do all of the demystifying himself by reading between the lines of the text and having to intuit and otherwise ferret out the meanings implicit in the equations.
That said, there is good news to report. The introduction does give a more than adequate account of what needs to be done to resolve the large-scale and small-scale problem -- i.e., between Relativistic phenomena and Quantum level phenomena, especially in demonstrating convincingly how the force of gravity would be adequately accounted for. The discussions of the constants required "to bring the four forces into phase, basically nailed down any doubts about the need for a paradigm shift to a new theory, String Theory. It is the first time that I have fully understood how this merger would take place.
For this alone the book gets three stars. It would have helped if the authors had given even a minimum review of the role symmetry and super-symmetry such as the "Gage Group" and their respective "symmetry breaking" actions play in this whole process. It is one thing for the reader to have to intuit these meanings, and quite another to see ones understanding confirmed in the text. As it stands, I was required to refer to other texts to get fuller explanations and understandings of the role of these centrally important ideas.
As for the rest of the book, as with the previous ones, there are many equations thrown about with little explanation, as if the mere presentation of complex equations themselves were sufficient to demystify a complex subject. It is not.
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