Before I became Physics Today's online editor, I ran the magazine's Search and Discovery department. For seven years, it was my responsibility to make sure that Search covered the most important and interesting research in the physical sciences.
In that span, Search ran just two stories about string theory:
- "Lovely as a Tree Amplitude: Hidden Structures Underlie Feynman Diagrams" (July 2004)
- "A String-Theory Calculation of Viscosity Could Have Surprising Applications" (May 2005)
The first story, by Steve Blau, described work by Ed Witten, Freddy Cachazo, and Peter Svrcek. In 2003 Witten had discovered a mathematical connection between a certain type of string theory and a certain regime of quantum chromodynamics. What prompted the news story was the three theorists' use of that connection to simplify some QCD calculations.
The second story, again by Steve Blau, was similar in character. In 2001 Dam Son, Giuseppe Policastro, and Andrei Starinets had found they could tackle certain problems in plasma dynamics by combining Juan Maldacena's famous duality with hydrodynamics. The story was prompted by Son, Starinets, and Pavel Kotun's extension of that previous work to derive a general lower bound to a fluid's shear viscosity divided by its entropy density.
Given string theory's high ambition to account for all nature's forces and particles, given the number of string theorists working to achieve that ambition, and given the general public's interest in string theory, two stories in seven years might seem low. But is it?
A typical Search story describes results that significantly advance a field and are of potential interest to all Physics Today's readers, from acousticians to x-ray astronomers. My colleagues and I don't avoid covering difficult papers, nor do we oversimplify the essential physics when we write our stories. In his news story about the 2009 physics Nobel, Bert Schwarzschild did not brush Yoichiro Nambu's and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa's theoretical achievements under the carpet.
But when we ask our readers to follow a technical story—one that we've struggled to make as accessible as possible—they deserve a payoff for investing their time. Speculative theories whose prospects for vindication are remote don't quite deliver.
There's another, more mundane explanation for the dearth of string theory news in Physics Today. Search stories tend to be about one or two papers. In fields where significant individual advances are hard to spot, the expert-written feature article is often the better editorial option.
During my spell as head of Search, Physics Today published three feature articles on string theory: "The Cosmological Constant Problem" by Tom Banks (March 2004), "Solving Quantum Field Theories via Curved Spacetimes" by Igor Klebanov and Juan Maldacena (January 2009), and "What Black Holes Teach about Strongly Coupled Particles" by Clifford Johnson and Peter Steinberg (May 2010).
Now it's quite possible that by some objective, but hard-to-define, yardstick, Physics Today has under-covered string theory. On the other hand, the question that forms the title of this post is one I had to ask myself. None of the hundreds of physicists I've been in contact with over the years ever posed it to me.
