Michael Duff, Imperial College London

"Thirty Years of Erice on the Brane"

ABSTRACT: After initially meeting with fierce resistance, branes, p-dimensional extended objects which go beyond particles (p=0) and strings (p=1), now occupy centre stage in theoretical physics as microscopic components of M-theory, as the seeds of the AdS/CFT correspondence, as a branch of particle phenomenology, as the higher-dimensional progenitors of black holes and as entire universes in their own right. Notwithstanding this early opposition, Nino Zichichi invited me to to talk about supermembranes and eleven dimensions at the 1987 School on Subnuclear Physics and has continued to keep Erice on the brane ever since. I provide some personal recollections.