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...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The fake authors are distorted versions of the true authors of the book Superspace Or One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry. I'm quite sure that's Siegel that made this because you can recongnize his humour (see the preface of the book or his free online QFT book "Fields").

Maxime said...

W.C. Gall of course refers to the ladies' room.