I just read Feynman’s talk on ‘What Is and What Should Be The Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society’ in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” and I’m necessarily skewed toward the pessimistic on science’s place in today’s culture.

Update: Actually, I want to strengthen the above paragraph, after reading a reminder from Freund’s book “Introduction to Supersymmetry”. The mathematical threads of supersymmetry (algebraic constructions) apparently were appearing in the late sixties and early seventies, but 1971 saw Ramond, and Neveu and Schwarz introduce supersymmetry in the context of string theory in, I think, the first physical context, and independently of the other work. There’s also some independent work that was not in the string theory context at around the same time, by Gol’fand and Lichtman.

(Rest of what I said below stands…)

Lots of the development and application of the idea was first in the context (and by workers in) of string theory in those early years and some to come, before four dimensional models were constructed and studied in their own independent right.

String theories were also the first theories in which the role of supersymmetry was recognized as crucial for internal consistency, driving the compelling suggestion that if string theories have something to do with nature, then maybe nature might know something about supersymmetry.

So the essence of what he says is correct, I’d say.

-cvj