David Gross was one of the physicists who developed the heterotic string theory, one of the major findings of the first superstring revolution. In 2004, Gross earned (along with colleagues Frank Wilczek and David Politzer) the Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1973 discovery of asymptotic freedom in the strong nuclear interaction of quarks. (This […]
Joe Polchinski proved that string theory required objects of more than one dimension, called branes. Although the concept of branes had previously been introduced, Polchinski explored the nature of D-branes. This work was crucial to the second superstring revolution of 1995. Polchinski’s work is seen as fundamental to the development of M-theory, brane world scenarios, […]