Monday, February 23, 2009

Fun with the G-string

If you like parodies of academic articles (and I know you do), check out how the early fathers of string theory used to have fun: The Super G-String. I don't know who is behind it (it is hosted on Warren Siegel's webpage) but the fake authors are V. Gates ("wie geht's?", a reference to Jim Gates), Empty Kangaroo, M. Roachcock (cockroach), and W.C. Gall (let me know if you crack this one---my attempt is the French word calvitie...).

I came across this paper because it is mentioned in the introduction of Aspinwall's lectures on D-Branes on Calabi-Yau Manifolds, where he writes in a footnote about D-branes that "The first reference to such objects that the author is aware of is, oddly enough, section 4 of [1]."
And indeed, on section 4 of the parody, there is an allusion to what we would call nowadays braneworld model-building, with the open string ending on a four-dimensional submanifold. So humour can be serious sometimes! After all the researcher's work isn't that different in its essence from a ludic fantasy...