Can you do away with strings?

Posted by alexh110 on November 16, 2003 at 19:48:08:

Is it possible to build a model where it's simply vibrations of a multi-dimensional topology which produce all the particles we observe?

In other words, instead of having a string vibrating in a multi-dimensional space; could you just have a vibrating empty space? Such that everything we observe could be produced by these vibrations interacting and propagating around the Universe, in the same way that strings do.

Another way to put this is: could you think of a string as simply a string-shaped warp in the structure of space-time, rather than as a string-shaped bit of matter sitting in space-time?

When I studied symmetry groups in particle physics, I often wondered whether that was the direction it was heading, because all you seemed to need was a symmetry, rather than an object inside a symmetry.
I thought maybe that mass/energy and space-time would turn out to be one in the same thing.

I never actually got round to asking whether people have worked on such models?

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