

Their results address a long-standing problem in the string theory subfield of integrability, and could prove meaningful for the entire strings community. In a recent paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, physicists from Perimeter Institute and Brazil’s Instituto de Física Teórica and the South American Institute for Fundamental Research (IFT-SAIFR) turned a string-theory problem into a pants-cutting problem, and applied it to a more complex system.


#Strings theory trio full
By cutting a challenging physics problem down to size, the trio of researchers found a way to simplify and solve it, and created a powerful solution for string interactions that are much too complicated to study in their full state. While it sounds like the set-up for a punchline, that sudden insight, published in 2015, has proved to be no joke.
#Strings theory trio how to

Other researchers maintain that string theory will one day turn up results. "String theorists propose a seemingly endless amount of mathematical constructions that have no known relationship to observation," Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany who has been critical of string theory, previously told Live Science. But in 2018, an influential paper suggested that not a single one of these myriad hypothetical universes looked like our cosmos specifically, each lacked a description of dark energy as we currently understand it. This multiverse landscape seemed to provide enough possibilities that, should researchers explore them, they would come across one that corresponded to our own version of reality. The most recent challenges to string theory have come from the framework itself, which predicts the existence of a potentially huge number of unique universes, as many as 10^500 (that's the number 1 followed by 500 zeroes). "Are you chasing a ghost, or is the collection of you just too stupid to figure this out?" teased Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum's Hayden Planetarium, who pointed out that progress on string theory had been patchy in the previous years. In 2011, physicists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History for the 11th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, to discuss whether it made sense to turn to string theory as a viable description of reality. Most of its predictions are untestable with current technology, and many researchers have wondered if they're going down a never-ending rabbit hole. A never-ending pursuitīut string theory has lately come under greater scrutiny. Some scientists have even attempted to use string theory to get a handle on dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of space and time. Researchers have used string theory to try to answer fundamental questions about the universe, such as what goes on inside a black hole, or to simulate cosmic processes like the Big Bang. They've simply described how the extra dimensions are all curled up in an extremely tiny space, on the order of 10^-33 centimeters, which is small enough that we can't normally detect them, according to NASA. That the theory bizarrely requires 11 dimensions to work - rather than the three of space and one of time we normally experience - has not dissuaded physicists who advocate it. The theory explains gravity via a particular vibrating string whose properties correspond to that of the hypothetical graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that would carry the gravitational force.
