Regge Theory
Also called analyticity of the Second Kind, or the bootstrap principle. The principle is that all strongly interacting particles lie on Regge trajectories. This was considered the definitive sign that all the hadrons are composite particles, but within S-matrix theory, they are not thought of as being made up of elementary constituents.
The Regge theory hypotheses allowed for the construction of string theories, based on bootstrap principles. The additional assumption was the narrow resonance approximation, which started with stable particles on Regge trajectories, and added interaction loop by loop in a perturbation series.
String theory was given a Feynman path-integral interpretation a little while later. The path integral in this case is the analog of a sum over particle paths, not of a sum over field configurations. Feynman's original path integral formulation of field theory also had little need for local fields, since Feynman derived the propagators and interaction rules largely using Lorentz invariance and unitarity.
Read more about this topic: S-matrix Theory
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