PHILOSOPHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE STRING THEORY

Many years have passed since P. Dirac unified mathematically the special relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Dirac's phenomenal success evoked the effort to unify also the general relativity theory and quantum mechanics. A. Einstein considered quantum mechanics incomplete, therefore he tried to develop a unified theory of the field. He did not succeed despite the fact that he spent 30 years developing the theory. Physicists of several generations have tried to overcome these inconsistencies in physical science using various methods. In the last four decades more and more space has been given to the string physical theory. The theory has a very ambitious goal. It wants to unify three so far independent physical interactions into one theory which could possibly have the features of the theory of everything. There have been other attempts to create quantum theory of gravity, however, they lack the ambition to explain the standard model. They are the twistor theory of R. Penrose and loop quantum gravity. The present paper, however, does not aim at comparing these theories.