The Catenary Revisited: From Newtonian Strings to Superstrings
National Institute for Theoretical Physics (NITheP),Stellenbosch 7600 (South Africa).(Dated: November 2010)The dynamics of extended objects, such as strings and membranes, has attracted more attentionin the past decades since the fundamental objects introduced in high-energy physics are no morepointlike. Their motion is generally intricate to describe. This article argues that the Newtoniananalogy of a catenary with free ends oﬀers a good description of some processes such as gravitationalradiation by an accelerated brane.