弦論歷史
S矩陣理論

維爾納·海森堡1943年一項研究計劃說弦理論是S-矩陣理論的產物。
約翰·惠勒于1937年引入S矩阵后，從1950年後期到60年代，許多著名的理論家都接受並提倡。但該領域在70年代中期被邊緣化並被丟棄 並在80年代被量子色動力學取代了。
1943年，维尔纳·海森堡提出了S矩阵理论作为粒子相互作用的原理。
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The theory presented a radical rethinking of the foundations of physical laws. By the 1940s it had become clear that the proton and the neutron were not pointlike particles like the electron. Their magnetic moment differed greatly from that of a pointlike spin-½ charged particle, too much to attribute the difference to a small perturbation. Their interactions were so strong that they scattered like a small sphere, not like a point. Heisenberg proposed that the strongly interacting particles were in fact extended objects, and because there are difficulties of principle with extended relativistic particles, he proposed that the notion of a space-time point broke down at nuclear scales.
Without space and time, it becomes difficult to formulate a physical theory. Heisenberg proposed a solution to this problem: focusing on the observable quantities—those things measurable by experiments. An experiment only sees a microscopic quantity if it can be transferred by a series of events to the classical devices that surround the experimental chamber. The objects that fly to infinity are stable particles, in quantum superpositions of different momentum states.
Heisenberg proposed that even when space and time are unreliable, the notion of momentum state, which is defined far away from the experimental chamber, still works. The physical quantity he proposed as fundamental is the quantum mechanical  amplitude for a group of incoming particles to turn into a group of outgoing particles, and he did not admit that there were any steps in between.
The S-matrix is the quantity that describes how a collection of incoming particles turn into outgoing ones. Heisenberg proposed to study the S-matrix directly, without any assumptions about space-time structure. But when transitions from the far-past to the far-future occur in one step with no intermediate steps, it becomes difficult to calculate anything. In quantum field theory, the intermediate steps are the fluctuations of fields or equivalently the fluctuations of virtual particles. In this proposed S-matrix theory, there are no local quantities at all.
Heisenberg proposed to use unitarity to determine the S-matrix. In all conceivable situations, the sum of the squares of the amplitudes must equal 1. This property can determine the amplitude in a quantum field theory order by order in a perturbation series once the basic interactions are given, and in many quantum field theories the amplitudes grow too fast at high energies to make a unitary S-matrix. But without extra assumptions on the high-energy behavior, unitarity is not enough to determine the scattering, and the proposal was ignored for many years.
Heisenberg's proposal was revived in 1956 when Murray Gell-Mann recognized that dispersion relations—like those discovered by Hendrik Kramers and Ralph Kronig in the 1920s (see Kramers–Kronig relations)—allow the formulation of a notion of causality, a notion that events in the future would not influence events in the past, even when the microscopic notion of past and future are not clearly defined. He also recognized that these relations might be useful in computing observables for the case of strong interaction physics. The dispersion relations were analytic properties of the S-matrix, and they imposed more stringent conditions than those that follow from unitarity alone. This development in S-matrix theory stemmed from Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Leonard Goldberger's (1954) discovery of crossing symmetry, another condition that the S-matrix had to fulfil.
Prominent advocates of the new "dispersion relations" approach included Stanley Mandelstam and Geoffrey Chew, both at UC Berkeley at the time. Mandelstam discovered the double dispersion relations, a new and powerful analytic form, in 1958, and believed that it would provide the key to progress in the intractable strong interactions.