String Theory and the Real World

The aim of this book is to explain why "string theory" may provide the comprehensive underlying theory that describes and explains our world, perhaps fairly soon. Although such a claim might seem controversial to many, I hope to convince the reader that after progress in recent years this is now a defendable goal, and one deserving of broad encouragement. And I hope to convince the reader that not only are string theories about our world testable, but data will be essential to making the role of string theories compelling.

This book is not a systematic review, or a pedagogical explication. It is an enthusiastic, somewhat speculative, somewhat personal view of how compactified string/M-theories – plus data that may be reachable – seem to have the possibilities of leading to a comprehensive underlying theory of particle physics and cosmology, perhaps soon. The book is well founded on three decades of compactification research, and over two decades of compactifying M-theory, which is used as the main example because it is where my own work has focused. I’ll explain ‘compactification’ in the within. If string/M-theory is to be of any value in understanding our world it will be through compactified string/M-theories – the book is about them.