• Strings from Almost Nothing (arXiv version)
• Strings from almost nothing (Notice of acceptance by Physical Review Letters)

Performing an experiment to test string theory appears to be nearly impossible, so we need to use other ways of testing it. This paper uses an intriguing "bootstrap" approach. The authors made a small number of apparently reasonable assumptions and discovered that string theory was the unique result of those assumptions. This bootstrap approach is not nearly as good as an experiment, but it does tell us that we cannot yet rule out string theory.

In this paper, we argue for the uniqueness of string theory from the fewest assumptions possible. All amplitude properties—the spectrum of masses and spins, high-energy behavior, and even its explicit mathematical form—are outputs of this bootstrap construction.

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Author: Flower Snark
Email: flowersnark@gmail.com

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