Re: Latest "Top Cites" from Peskin

On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Peter Woit wrote:

> Some people think citation counts are highly meaningful.
> These seem to indicate that string/M-theory almost completely
> died after 1999  (in the sense of having no more new ideas),
> with a small PP-wave blip in 2001-2 which may have been its
> last gasp (has there been a gasp of PP-wave size or large since
> 2001-2?).

I think it is a fair statement. The BMN / pp-wave movement, started in
2002, is so far the last big research program in string theory that has
excited many hundreds of followups. It has showed us that we really need
the full string theory - with all the stringy excitations and so on, not
just gravity - on the "AdS" side of the AdS/CFT correspondence.

There are several newer directions that many people are talking about -
the Dijkgraaf-Vafa program and superpotentials from the matrix models; a
renewed interest in two-dimensional string theory and the old matrix
models; speculations on cosmology; and several others. Let me admit that I
would agree that although these programs might be interesting for many,
they are less far-reaching and solid than the BMN revolution.

Yes, string theory does not have a new revolution every year. But let's
not be too quick. We had a moderate revolution in 2002, and 2003 is not
yet over. ;-)

I also want to say that the stringy research is much more intense and
faster-changing than the experimental and phenemenological investigations.
There are many highly-cited topics outside string theory that have been
cited like that for 10 years or more, but the amount of really new physics
is not too large. The people who work in a given field tend to continue to
work in it even when other fields become more interesting.
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