Little Book of String

The Little Book of String Theory, by Steve Gubser, is a non-technical account of string theory and its applications to collider physics, published by Princeton University Press in April 2010.  The publishers maintain the official web page for the book.

My goal in this book is to provide a short but searching account of string theory for the layperson. I describe many of the central features of string theory and superstring theory, including tachyons, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, dualities, and branes.  I devote two chapters at the end to the efforts to apply string theory to understand collider physics.  Although I generally avoid the mathematical side of string theory, I do give an account of some of the central results of relativity and quantum mechanics that string theory incorporates: results like the relation $E = mc^2$ between energy and mass, and the uncertainty relationship between momentum and position.

The book contains a number of informal calculations, whose details are not presented.  The main purpose of these pages is to show those details.  Some of the calculations on these pages provide more decimal places of precision than the figures quoted in the book.  Each new calculation is marked by the page number in the book, like this: "On p. 13,...."

Errata, if any, will also be recorded on these pages.  Each erratum will be marked by page number, like this: "Erratum: On p. 8,...."  If you find an error, please e-mail me at [email protected].

Here is the table of contents, with links to the page listing calculations and (possibly in the future) errata:

You can also read a little about me in  this unofficial "About the author" page.