I understand that the vibration modes of an elementary string determines the identity of its particle. When I first heard this, I visualized a stiff circular steel band-like entity vibrating with 2, 3, 4, 5,... nodes or antinodes, the number determining the particle. This was further supported when I asked a well-known physicist how one gets from equations to physical strings, and he said he recognized the harmonic nature of the solutions.
Bu then I noticed that physicists seem to accept the image of a soft spaghetti-like string flopping about with no well-defined vibrational modes. I asked another physicist about this, and his answer was simply that a string has multiple modes, not necessarily in a harmonic progression.
So my questions are 1) How do you visualize the vibrations of a string, and 2) how are they related to particle identity?
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