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Evidence for String Theory?
Izeickl writes "PhysOrg.com is reporting that scientists working at a neutrino detector nicknamed AMANDA at the South Pole report that evidence for string theory may soon be coming. Extra dimensions predicted by string theory may affect observed numbers of certain neutrinos and this is what the scientists will be looking for. The article further states 'No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string theory and other theories that attempt to build upon our current understanding of the universe.'"
I heard that there was only one other dimension... and the only difference was we are all wearing mexican hats... I thought this was general knowledge - perhaps the scientists here should have checked the facts before they started considering 24 dimensional super gravities and the like
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Great, now we'll be able to see Cthulhu and he'll get all embarassed because he'll be like, in a shower or something when that thing's turned on, and he'll eat the goddamn earth. Can't we be happy with *our* dimension of existence? Wasn't invading Iraq enough?
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
This is not the only experiment which could probe large extra dimensions; the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is another notable experiment. However, this article is not implying that AMANDA (or any other experiment) has found evidence for string theory, or even that they are likely to.
Normally, string physics is thought to appear at the Planck scale (far beyond what we will ever be able to probe directly), because that is thought to be the size of the "curled up" extra dimensions. However, it's possible that the dimensions aren't actually that small, that they could be much larger — possibly not much smaller than a millimeter. (They could even be infinitely large, not curled up at all, and we could be living on a 4-dimensional "brane" close to another one.) In those cases, stringy behavior is brought down from the Planck scale to as low as 1 TeV (tera-electron volt), which is the energy that corresponds to a distance somewhat below a millimeter. (By the Uncertainty Principle, higher energies correspond to shorter distances that can be probed.)
The problem is, there isn't a lot of reason to believe that these scenarios ought to be true; they are highly speculative (even relative to string theory as a whole!). To a large extent, they are just hopeful thinking — that stringy physics might occur at in an energy regime we can probe. They could be helpful in understanding the hierarchy problem (the question of whether and why there is an absence of new particles between the electroweak and Planck scales), but when you get down to it, most high energy physicists are not betting on large extra dimensions. So these experiments might very well not show up any evidence of string theory (even if string theory is true).
"Strings" are just another way of describing devine, Noodly Appendages.
Actually, this is really cool. Looking forward to what the use of the new detector shows, or doesn't, as the case may be. String theory is such a mind bender for most people (including me), that anything making it more directly tangible will really help focus the conversation. Or end it. Either way is good.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Construction on AMANDA began in 1994, and South Pole was chosen because you need high transparency ice. That means you need an ice sheet substantially thicker than 1400 meters (the bubble conversion zone) in a region with few dust or volcanic impurities. South Pole satisfies both these properties very well.
AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube,
Also seen in such blockbuster hits as Boyz n the Nucleus, Three Quarks, and xXx: State of the Quantum.
It's cool that there's a testable prediction coming out of string theory, but I would take this with a grain of salt for the next few decades. For one thing, I don't think neutrinos themselves are well enough understood yet that string theory would provide the only (or even the best) possible explanation for discrepencies in their 'up' and 'down' neutrino rates. A multitude of experiments are being done now just to try to pin down the parameters governing neutrnio behavior. So if AMANDA sees the discrepency predicted by string theory, it would take a lot more work and many more years to demonstrate that there isn't a better explanation for it.
Just because you don't know how to falsify it doesn't mean it's not falsifiable. Religion is by definition not falsifiable.
That's the big, important, difference.
Peon: We've counted 12 possible events out of 789,567,345,754,234,567,876 (est) neutrinos passing thru the detector.
TS: Hmm, that's as expected, totally useless number of events to draw any inferences from. Keep at it.
(Next day) South Pole Grant Administrator: Hey, TS, got any news I can tell Washington? Your grant approval comittee meeting for the Big Project is next week!
TS: Oh, yes, Er, Um, hte data we got from their previous infusion of cash indicates Big Things, the possible proff of String Theory, SuperGravity, The AntiMacassar Postulate, and much more. But better just mention String Theory to the commitee, it was on the cover of Popular Science last month.
SPGA: Will do!
"faster tan light travel"? I think that's called a solarium/sunbed. ;)
New Scientist sure has created a lot of Heim groupies.
The fact is, pretty much nobody knows what the hell Heim theory predicts. Most of his theory was never published or reviewed by his peers. We don't even know if his theory is self-consistent, whether the predictions hyped by New Scientist or the Internet "Heim appreciation society" that's pushing it are actually predictions of the theory, etc. For that matter, hardly anybody knows what the definition of the theory is.
Just because some people have made a bunch of wild claims about what Heim theory can predict, doesn't mean it's something to get excited about. Nor does Heim's reputation. Schroedinger himself thought he had come up with a unified field theory, called a big press conference, privately spoke of winning a second Nobel Prize. Some reporter asked Einstein what he thought, and he responded with a carefully worded response to the effect that one shouldn't get the impression that physics is like unstable Third World dictatorships, always experiencing revolutions. Schroedinger's theory didn't pan out and the two stopped corresponding for over a year.
Will it stop the onward march of socialism?
;)
I'm confused by this one. There's an onward march of socialism? I thought it fascism
You essentially ask: what use is fundamental physics research?
You can't ever predict what applications fundamental research will have on technology. Sometimes, things are immediate: after Roengten discovered X-rays in 1895, the medical application was obvious. On the other hand, in 1905 Einstein predicted that objects moving fast experience time dilation relative to stationary objects. In 1915 he also predicted that the same would hold for objects higher up in a gravitational well. This was completely irrelevant to then-current technology: Nothing man-made moved faster than 500mph, or got high enough off the ground, and anyway time couldn't be measured accurately enough for these effects to matter. Swing around to the 1980s. The US government is now launching the GPS system, which depends on exteremly precise timing synchronization between a satellite in orbit and the unit on the ground. It turns out that the two relativistic time-dilation effects have to be taken into account for the system to work at all. Who'd have thunk this in 1915?
Moreover, progress is usually incremental. No single discovery will "cure HIV" or give us infinite energy. New physics beyond the standard model might have technological applications in 80 years. Does that mean we shouldn't discover it today?
-William Brendel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No seriously. The filter you propose wouldn't even catch the travesty that was epicycles. There's a reason why Occam's razor is such an integral part of scientific philosophy.
[/flamebait]
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
...the robust Christianity I find in the Bible.
Yeah, I especially liked the part where Jesus went around hiding dinosaur bones to test our faith. He's such a scamp that Jesus.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Put yet another way, if string/M- theory is not falsifiable then it is not making any predictions about reality and hence it is useless as a model to tell us anything. That's hardly the case.
No, that really IS the case from a lot of physicists' POVs.
One problem with the theory is that according one physicist's paper, string theory offers 10 to 500th power different universes all with different physical properties and with many different kinds of forces. String theory practioners -- dare I say worshippers -- use this to say that our universe is merely one out of 10 to the 500th power different possible universes. Some flakes, like Michio Kaku, think we can colonize a new universe through a wormhole with light-speed traveling single-atom nanobots containing the technological and cultural seeds of a new civilization to avoid the heat death of our own universe. (This article is why I'll never respect Michio Kaku's words ever again. How did this man ever get a reputation for understanding physics?)
Other physicists rightly point out that if they theory can handle an almost uncountable number of alternate universes with alternate sets of forces and physical constants, then it doesn't actually predict anything useful since you can't figure out how to predict anything about our own specific single universe has and that its not falsifiable because any new observations we find can be retrofitted into the theory by playing with and changing the math as has happened numerous times since the theory's inception.
Of course, string theory may be right. The philosophical problem is that many of our best minds are spending all their time on a theory that can't be proven or disproven with current technology. Some of the experiments needed to confirm or deny string theory will take super-colliders capable of generating energy on a scale far beyond even a type I civilizaions' resources (the theoretical energy densities needed to tear matter down to its component strings).
Since its practioners frequently disdain the necessity of experimental verification, since it's useless as a predictive tool, and since it can be retrofitted for any information that conflicts with it that we'll be able to achieve in the forseeable future, string theory is for all practical purposes nothing more than a math-based religion.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I work for AMANDA/IceCube. It's nice to see that our supercool experiment gets media attention, but there are a few statements in that article which need a comment or two. User davidoff404 already commented on the theoretical aspects of the article, so I will mostly limit myself to the experimental aspects.
Actually, we see about 900 neutrino events per year. Their directions are homogeneously distributed over the sky and the energy spectrum is (still) compatible with the assumption that all these neutrinos were produced in interactions of high energy cosmic rays (protons, nuclei) with the Earth atmosphere (all around the globe). It might be that there are neutrinos among them from extraterrestrial sources, but individual events cannot be identified as such. We continue taking data until neutrino events from single extraterrestrial sources (or with higher energy than expected from atmospheric neutrinos) pile up enough such that they stick out over the atmospheric neutrino background.
Note: we do not detect those neutrinos directly; they interact with the ice, and may convert into a "muon" (which is like an electron, only about 200 times heavier, and it decays after a little while). That muon still carries most of the neutrino's energy with it, so it flies practically with the speed of light through the ice, sending out Cherenkov light (the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom) along the way. The tracks can be kilometers long. We only see the part of the track in or near our detector, so we can only estimate a lower limit of the energy of an individual muon. When the neutrino does not convert into a muon, then the energy is dissipated in a relatively small volume; which makes it much harder to estimate the direction, but easier to estimate the energy.
(And of course those atmospheric neutrinos are not only background. We are happy to see them, as they prove that our detector is not blind. And we can use them to test the models of cosmic ray spectra and to study properties of neutrinos themselves.)
Actually, neutrinos are so weakly interacting that the vast majority of them just flies right through the Earth. It is really tiny fraction of them which happens to bump into an terrestrial atom. And an even tinier fraction which bumps into an ice molecule near our machine. So they come from all directions, up and down, the Earth is not shielding them. However, like everywhere on Earth there is a lot of cosmic rays thundering down on the atmosphere above the South Pole, and some of it results in high energy muons which make it all the way down to our detector. Their rate is about a million times higher than that of the muons originating from the neutrinos. Only when we see a muon track going upwards, or when it has an energy much higher than expected from the cosmic ray spectrum, then we call it a neutrino event.
When we start talking about really very high energy neutrinos (PeV and more) then the picture gets a little bit different: at those energies the probability that a neutrino interacts with atoms gets so high that the Earth is indeed opaque for neutrinos. If there are such high energy neutrinos flying through the universe, then we expect to see them from above and horizontally. This is already expected with standard model physics, without assumptions about microscopic black holes; so I am curious as to what Goldberg and Feng are after.