"The strings just fell out," says Clifford Cheung, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. "We didn't start with any assumptions about strings at all, but then the solution contained the cornerstone signatures of strings." Though the work does not amount to experimental evidence for string theory, it is "very suggestive from the theoretical viewpoint, since the general assumptions could have yielded infinite solutions, but they yielded only one," Cheung says.
One of the key signatures of strings that "fell out" of the team's analysis is known as the string spectrum. Discovered by Italian theoretical physicist Gabriele Veneziano of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the late 1960s, the spectrum is an infinite tower, or ladder, of particles, in which the masses and spins increase in discrete steps.
Other researchers later came to realize that Veneziano's tower of particles corresponds to a harmonic series of a vibrating string. If you pluck a violin string, you'll get a series of notes representing the fundamental note and overtones that follow a similar pattern.
String theory was born, but it was not until 1974 that Caltech's John Schwarz, the Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, and his colleague Jol Scherk, a French physicist, realized that the theory included gravity, thereby forming the first connection between string theory and general relativity.
@#7 ... String Theory requires super symmetry. ...
OK, I'm still listening ...
How Supersymmetry Saved String Theory (2023)
www.universetoday.com
... Super symmetry requires super symmetric particles called "sparticles". ...
OK, still hanging in there with ya.
But then you note ...
... If sparticles are real, the LHC should have found at least one of them. It did not and thus super symmetry doesn't exist. ...
That's where I have questions.
Fundamentally, the inability to show the existence of something does not necessarily mean that the entity (sparticles) does not exist.
@#7 ... The fact that some physicists spent their life working on a theory that's false ...
Yeah.
And the Sun was once thought to orbit the Earth.
When did we realize that Earth orbits the Sun? (2024)
www.astronomy.com
"When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won't have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore."
Stephen Hawking
www.theguardian.com
Personally, I'm still stuck at the shave and a haircut two bits stage.
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