9/5/2023 0 Comments 6 strings theoryWe haven't found any evidence for supersymmetry. So if we found evidence for supersymmetry, it wouldn't prove string theory, but it would be a major steppingstone. Within string theory, supersymmetry allows the strings to describe not just the forces of nature but also the building blocks, giving that theory the power to truly be a theory of everything. The machinery of supersymmetry was first worked out by string theorists, but took fire as an interesting avenue for all high-energy physicists to potentially solve some problems with the Standard Model and make predictions for new physics. Supersymmetry is a hypothesized symmetry of nature that links together all the fermions (the building blocks of reality like electrons and quarks) with the bosons (the carriers of the forces like gluons and photons) under a single framework. Still, we might be able to pick up some interesting clues, and one of those clues is supersymmetry. If we found a cosmic string, it wouldn't necessarily validate string theory - there would be a lot more work needed to be done, both theoretically and observationally, to tell apart the string theory prediction from the crack-in-spacetime version. To date, no cosmic strings have been found in our universe. So if we found a cosmic string floating around out there in the cosmos, we could study it carefully and check if it's really something predicted by string theory. Cosmic strings are universe-spanning defects in spacetime, leftover from the earliest moments of the Big Bang, and they're a pretty generic prediction of the physics of those epochs of the universe.īut cosmic strings might also be super-duper-stretched-out strings from string theory, which are usually so small that "microscopic" is too big of a word, but have been stretched and pulled by the incessant expansion of the universe. One suggestion put forth by the string theorists is another kind of theoretical string: the cosmic string. Perhaps we might gain some stringy insights by looking into the history of the Big Bang. Related: The history and structure of the universe (infographic)Įven though we can't reach the energies needed in our particle colliders to really take an in-depth look into the potential world of strings, 13.8 billion years ago our entire universe was a cauldron of fundamental forces. So string theory isn't even up to the task of making predictions that we could compare to hypothetical experiments. We only have approximations that we hope come close to the actual theory, but we have no idea how right (or wrong) we are. String theory only comes into play when we try to combine all four forces with a single description, which only really matters at the very highest energy scales - so high that we could never, ever build a machine to reach such heights.īut even if we could devise a particle collider to directly probe the energies of quantum gravity, we couldn't test string theory, because as of yet string theory isn't complete. And on the other we have general relativity, which allows us to understand gravity as the bending and warping of spacetime.įor all cases that we can directly examine, using one or the other is just fine. On one hand, we have the techniques of quantum field theory, which provide a microscopic description of electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. As of today, we have two different approaches for explaining the four forces of nature. Related to that smallness is the energy scale needed to probe the regimes where string theory actually matters. We simply can't ever stare at a string directly. The strings are so small, in fact, that they appear to us to be point-like particles, such as electrons and photons and neutrons. That's far, far smaller than anything we can possibly hope to probe even with our most precise instruments. The strings of string theory are stupendously small, thought to be somewhere around the Planck scale, a bare 10^-34 meters across.
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