Excerpt from an essay on a visit to the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara.

Long, long ago, there had been a dream by a particularly enthusiastic subset of theoretical physicists that essentially everything you could hope to know about particle physics could be inferred from some set of reasonable physical principles or axioms.  It was therefore referred as a bootstrap, because you could, the hope was, use those physical principles to make some predictions, but then those predictions could themselves form axioms from which more predictions could be made, and continuing, you could pull theory predictions up from seemingly nothing by their own bootstraps.  The most vociferous of these bootstrappers believed that the techniques that had been developed by Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Freeman Dyson, and others that had been so successful in marrying special relativity and quantum mechanics and applied to understanding electromagnetism, would be completely useless in understanding the force responsible for the zoo of particles, collectively called hadrons, discovered through the 1960s.  So they pushed and pushed, clawing their way up the mountain of predictions and many of those who were not as keen on the idea out of the field itself, but there were some victories, with perhaps the most influential on the future being Gabriele Veneziano’s discovery in 1968 of the function that described the probability that strings interacted.  However, the bootstrap program and its dreams were thoroughly killed in 1973 with the discovery that, actually, this force is entirely analogous to electromagnetism, and those same techniques developed by Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Freeman Dyson, and others were indeed effective and infinitely more powerful and direct than the bootstrap.

As these old techniques were dusted off and explored more and more by a larger and larger fraction of the field, some of those old bootstrap ideas sneaked back in.  The final form of a calculation that would evaluate to thousands of terms with these old rules could be compressed into a single term written on half a line and what’s more, you could prove, circumventing the old rules completely, that this simple form was completely general using an inductive step that bore that eery smell of the bootstrap.  These techniques were generalized to broader classes of predictions through the 1990s and by the early 2000s, it was realized that all of these miraculous relationships and simplifications were due to making the right axioms, the right assumptions that were necessarily and sufficiently maximally symmetric, the spherical cow of theoretical physics.  The field rightfully exploded, the few who toiled for decades before this revolution but continually demarked progress with novel relationships and new calculational methods hailed as the heroes of the field, and the bootstrap had returned, but in a form that worked and improved the way that things were done, not with rhetoric, but with results.  I was here for two weeks of a workshop on this New Bootstrap, close enough to my research that I could understand the language, but far enough away that I would merely quietly sit the back row during a talk, the flow of information strictly going one way.