Duality, Spacetime and Quantum Mechanics

MAY 01, 1997

Widely disparate themes from several decades of theoretical physics have recently converged to become parts of a single story. The result is a still‐mysterious ‘M‐theory’ that may revise our understanding of the role of quantum mechanics.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881616

Edward Witten

The purpose of this article is to describe some themes in theoretical physics that developed independently for many years, in some cases for decades, and then converged rather suddenly beginning around 1994–95. The convergence produced an upheaval sometimes called “the second superstring revolution.” It is as significant in its own way as “the first superstring revolution,” the period around 1984–85 when the potential of string theory to give a unified description of natural law was first widely appreciated.

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More about the authors

Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.