We will return to the history of string theory’s emergence and development later.  But here I’d like to step back and suggest that the above episode, now well established in string theory lore, encapsulates what will be the focus of this essay: an exploration of the question of why it is that string theory has enjoyed over the past three decades so much currency within the theoretical physics community.  To answer that question, it will be necessary to address related issues: What exactly is string theory and how does it differ conceptually from its predecessors, namely, Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum theory?  How is string theory produced by its community of practitioners?  And as an overlap, what is the broader socio-historical context out of which string theory has emerged?  What this essay hopes to convincingly argue is that string theory takes the shape it does in large part because of its specific cultural, historical, and organizational milieu.  At the conclusion of the essay, I will explore some of the arguments that come from string theory’s myriad and vociferous detractors and also attempt to more precisely situate string theory within that ambiguous and highly contested excluded middle that exists in current post Sokal-hoax discourse between the conceptual polarities ‘culture’ and ‘nature’.

In 1988, Sharon Traweek published an ethnography of the high energy physics community, based on field work conducted during both the mid-1970s and mid-1980s principally at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (or SLAC) and at Ko-Enerugie butsurigaku Kenkyusho (or KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan.[6]  Although she admits that her emphasis was on experimental physicists, as opposed to theoretical physicists, her observations, from an anthropological perspective, help shed light on why members of the string theory community consider, in retrospect, Veneziano’s ‘discovery’ of the Euler beta function an event worth circulating as having genuine historical import.  Traweek observes that while developments in high energy physics may evolve at a fast pace—by their own estimates, physicists claim that current contributions to the field have ‘a life expectancy of about six months’[7]—the structure of the community on the whole is relatively stable:

The community has a relatively fixed and highly articulated hierarchical structure: countries, laboratories, universities, and research specialities are ranked with surprisingly slight disagreement and with little change over decades.  The community is divided into theorists and experimentalists—moieties which are interdependent, each with distinctive duties. […] Physicists seem to be in constant circulation, moving around the world from lab to lab, department to department, always talking, forming alliances and collaborations.  Most important, they are bound together by a way of thinking, about the world and about knowledge and about themselves.[8]

At any given time, for example, CERN, in addition to its particle accelerator and associated detectors, may play host to upwards of 150 theorists.[9]  Other laboratories similarly sponsor theorists as well as experimentalists.

According to the international leaders of the community, there are about eight hundred to a thousand very active researchers in the world of their field.  They suggest that perhaps two thousand more are abreast of the latest developments.  Three or four hundred of all these people know one another quite well, and all the other practitioners want to.  About half of the groupare theorists; they work at blackboards alone or in small, short-lived collaborations of two or three people.[10]

When Veneziano published his paper in 1968, he was a research associate at CERN.  In the hierarchy of physicists his status was rather low: traditionally, aspiring physicists spend fifteen years in an apprenticeship consisting of undergraduate study, the completion of a postgraduate doctorate under the supervision of an advisor, then up to six years as a research associate or postdoctoral fellow.  Those who make the transition from the apprenticeship to the ranks of those customarily considered to deserve the title of practicing ‘physicist’ (by Traweek’s subjects’ estimates, about 25%) become first group members at a laboratory, then group leaders, then what Traweek calls ‘statesmen of science’[11].  In the case of theorists not directly affiliated with a laboratory, in the United States, the career ascent would have its parallel within the physics department of one of the sufficiently prestigious research universities: from instructor to assistant professor to associate professor to full professor to perhaps departmental head, analogous to the early stages of the ‘statesman’ phase in an experimental physicist’s career.

In some versions of the Veneziano story, his was an accidental discovery that required the validation of other more established physicists two years later to lend it credibility.  In his popular account of string theory, The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene describes Veenziano’s discovery thus: ‘Like memorized formulae used by a student who does not understand their meaning or justification, Euler’s beta function seemed to work, but no one know why’.[12]  Perhaps as a gesture of reconciliation, Brian Greeneinterviews Veneziano in the 2003 television documentary based on his popularization[13]: twentyfiveyearsafter the fact, Veneziano feels compelled to vindicate his reputationbyinsisting that his originalinsightwasmore than a mereaccidentaldiscovery, butrather the fortuitousresult of many hours of meticulousresearchand calculation:

I see occasionally, written in books, that, uh, that this model was invented by chance or was, uh, found in the math book, and, uh, this makes me feel pretty bad. What is true is that the function was the outcome of a long year of work, and we accidentally discovered string theory.[14]

Veneziano’sdepictionin defense of his rolein the monumentaleventemulatesquite closely what Traweekcalls the ‘literaryform’ of the ‘compositeaccount of the postdoc’sfortunes’: ‘the suffering hero strives for advancement, which is blocked by seemingly intractable obstacles.  The obstacles are finally overcome by an opportunistic and vigorous response to unforeseen circumstances.’[15]

In Veneziano’s case, as it is with theorists in general, the intractable obstacles spring from the physical theories themselves.  Postgraduate students get their first exposure to the community of practicing physicists: their advisors ‘cautiously allow them to see themselves as members of it; through stories of success and failure, stories about the work of the generation now in power, they teach the novices a style of “doing” physics and a “nose” for good issues’.[16]  As a natural progression from this introduction to ‘doing’ physics, postdocs must learn to look ‘two or three years ahead, trying to anticipate rewarding questions in physics’.  Doing good physics at this and higher levels is about ‘reducing […] questions to problems involving a finite set of variables’[17]  This requires a condensation of the past, a certain practical myopia, where the theorist focuses on framing what he wagers would be considered by his peers a viable solution to a well-established and interesting problem within the most current version of the state of the science.  In 1968, the as yet unexplained ‘duality’ of hadron scattering was precisely this sort of problem.  Yet as a mere postdoctoral associate, it would appear that Veneziano might have violated the established hierarchy with its concomitant restrictions on what each role could appropriately contribute.  Although not a central figure in the later development of string theory, after 1968 Veneziano did go on to establish a reputation and continue to contribute to the field.

The Veneziano episode further illustrates the dynamics of the high energy physics community, which Traweek describes as a ‘dispersed village’, ‘a small face-to-face community, even though an international one’[18].  Unlike the experimentalists, who are in large part tied to the laboratory, with its expensive and immobile equipment, theorists work alone or in small groups and are in ‘constant circulation’.  The structure of the community is both rigid and plastic, rigid in the sense that there are conventionally defined roles and ranks, as well as a rigorous and lengthy apprenticeship; there are then tacitly and explicitly enforced protocols of behavior, socializing, and information exchange; and most significantly, there exist clearly delineated principles for defining what constitutes a legitimate problem within the science.  Within those boundaries, the structure is plastic in that postdocs and up are expected to work independently in seeking out and tackling the nearly limitless gaps in the body of current knowledge, the legitimate problems, and to do this by taking full advantage of the resources at their disposal, the most important of which being the ‘network of exchange’ that links ‘otherwise autonomous units at every level of social organization.’[19]

Much of this network functions orally: physicists scan preprints and journal articles ‘in order to know who is writing about what.  If something catches their interest, they will phone or waylay the author to try to elicit, preferably face to face, what they want to know; it is assumed that the whole story is rarely written’[20].  Traweek suggests that ‘[i]n a community with easy access to widely disseminated written information, keeping crucial information accessible only in oral form is an impressively effective means of maintaining its boundaries.[21]’  This ‘network of exchange’ serves to provide an architecture that is both open and closed, that allows for the free flow of information along certain established and potential channels, while simultaneously closing off the network to background static, to corrupting or distracting interference from other networks.  I want to suggest that Veneziano’s paper, because of his status as a postdoc and because of its extraordinary claim arrived at through the somewhat unorthodox deployment of an formula from the slightly less prestigious domain of pure mathematics[22], had to wait for two years in that intermediary realm of not-quite-static, not-quite-accepted science, before the intervention and confirmation of other more established physicists granted it its effulgence, so to speak, and later, its canonization.

One could argue that with the maturation of the internet such mechanisms of closure through oral (and e-mail) networks of exchange are all the more critical: now physicists publish preprints of their journal articles through an open access web site called arXive.org[23], hosted by Cornell University.  While submissions to the archive are peer-reviewed, publication doesn’t necessarily guarantee a paper will receive the anticipated consideration by the community.  A participant must be linked into parallel networks of exchange; they must have adequate reputation with a cultivated audience to maximize their chances of garnering attention.[24]  They must attend the key conferences, do the right fellowships, win the best grants, form the most efficacious alliances, and cultivate the optimal electronic address books.  Although the high energy physics community prides itself on being a meritocracy, in practice, merit is based on more than the ‘truth’ potential of a physicist’s insights: it involves the exploitation of a complementary set of communication, political, and organizational skills that extend far beyond the core practice of doing ‘good physics’.

Traweek argues that:

If [oral communication] is a means of producing physics, physicists, and their culture, then written materials, articles and preprints, are the commodities the physicists produce in their turn.  Articles represent the consensus, the ‘facts’, data with the noise removed.  The authors of these written accounts own the information in the account.  Any subsequent users of that new information must pay royalties to the authors in the form of homage or credit, thereby increasing the accumulating reputations of the authors. […] Scientific writing keeps track of the results of these debates.  It is a record-keeping device, a spare ledger of credits and debits.[25]

Within the overarching network that constitutes the community as a whole, a subnetwork of preprints and journal articles functions as an economy measured in units of reputation-enhancing ‘facts’, or more specifically, solutions to collectively acknowledged problems.  This currency of problem solutions must be carefully managed within the peer-review process using the above-mentioned supplemental political and otherwise supra-scientific skills.

            Traweek paraphrases the predominantly male high energy physics community’s romanticization of their own agency in the process of doing physics as a kind of heroism, where the Herculean scientist must overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to penetrate and pry out eternal, universal secrets from a passive, feminized nature.  The narrative of doing physics takes the form of a rigidly formalized, even stylized act of aggression.  Andrew Pickering, on the hand, argues that physicists tend to promote an idealization of their agency as largely passive:

In the scientist’s account, scientists do not appear as genuine agents.  Scientists are represented rather as passive observers of nature: the facts of natural reality are revealed through experiment; the experimenter’s duty is simply to report what he sees; the theorist accepts such reports and the supplied apparently unproblematic explanations of them.  One gets little feeling that scientists actually do anything in their day-to-day practice. [his italics][26]

Here the act of doing physics is romanticized more as an amanuensis, an attentive passivity, coupled with a meticulous taking of dictation from an actively elusive whisperer.  Both versions of doing physics have the advantage of granting nature an absolute objectivity.  There exists a clearly demarked dichotomy between the rational, mobile subject and the autonomous, fixed, and relatively opaque object.  Experimenters eavesdrop on nature with their massive and costly sense extenders: accelerators, colliders, and detectors.  Theorists, in turn, eavesdrop on the experimenters: their embodied sense extensions take the form of mathematical models, which they struggle to arrange so that their models adequately conform to the data presented by and mediated through the experimenters and their sometimes indeterminately calibrated instruments.  We see this in the specific example of Veneziano in his gambit to explain the generally accepted data on hadron scattering through the mathematical structure of the Euler beta function.  We shall see this dynamic tension between active and passive idealizations of agency throughout the continuing development of string theory as well.

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