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Not that I work in this field, but I have heard the discourse from several people that string field theory is useless.

So I would like to ask two simple questions?

  1. What makes SFT so difficult? Especially, it seems to me that one can construct an action that satisfies general coordinate transformation invariance and gauge symmetry (more precisely BRST symmetry) by using the BV formalism, as shown by Witten, but why is this useless?

  2. When moving from QM to QFT has several practical benefits, for example, one can easily construct relativistic scattering problems in Lorentz-covariant form, but in what way is SFT superior to string theory?

Qmechanic
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Siam
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    Related/worth checking: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/70836/226902, https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/341323/226902 and https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/762546/226902 – Quillo May 04 '23 at 16:09
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    Possible duplicate: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/133225/226902 (but no very satisfying answers at the moment). – Quillo May 04 '23 at 16:16
  • recommend you read Not Even Wrong by Voit, or The Trouble With Physics by Smolin – niels nielsen May 04 '23 at 17:43
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    This might be relevant https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206974/string-field-theory-and-ads-cft/206979#206979 – anna v May 05 '23 at 04:14
  • The spectrum of a quantum relativistic string is an infinite tower of higer spin fields. That observation reveals that a quantum field that "creates and destroy strings" should be an infinite component field $\Psi[X]$ with infinite many spacetime fields, that is in sharp contrast to what is studied in ordinary QFT courses. – Ramiro Hum-Sah Nov 06 '23 at 03:55

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