String Theory
By: Prof. Joseph Polchinski (born on May 16, 1954 in White Plains, New York) is a physicist working on string theory. He graduated from Canyon del Oro High School in Tucson, Arizona in 1971, obtained his B.S. degree from Caltech in 1975, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 under the supervision of Stanley Mandelstam.
After postdoctoral positions at SLAC (1980–82) and Harvard (1982–84) he was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1992. Since 1992 he has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara.
http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/
Book Description
String theory has advanced rapidly over the last 15 years and is increasingly seen as the best, and perhaps only, route to the complete unification of the four fundamental forces--the so-called "theory of everything". This text provides, in two volumes, a thoroughly modern and comprehensive introduction to strings and superstrings, and brings the reader up to date on the latest developments in string duality, M-theory, D-branes, and the application of string theory to black hole quantum mechanics. The author is one of the world's top string theorists, and is also known as a clear and cogent writer. The two volumes are written at a level appropriate to graduate students in physics. This is the first major textbook on strings since the two volume work of Green, Schwartz and Witten 10 years ago (which sold extraordinarily well, reprinting within a month of publication). The main market for the book is theoretical physicists, particle physicists, astrophysicists, cosmologists and applied mathematicians. However, this is an accessible book on one of the most fundamental questions in physics by a top researcher. It has all the ingredients to be a best seller.
