Prospects and Limits For the LHC's Capabilities To Test String Theory

StartsWithABang writes: The Large Hadron Collider has just been upgraded, and is now making the highest energy collisions of any human-made machine ever. But even at 13 TeV, what are the prospects for testing String Theory, considering that the string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so? Surprisingly, there are a number of phenomenological consequences that should emerge, and looking at what we've seen so far, they may disfavor String Theory after all.

Comments

Re:Which string theory?

[gstoddart]

Sure, but ... if Richard Feynmann

criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation--a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.': These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.

I'll flat out admit I can't come close to understanding the voodoo which is string theory.

But that Feynman didn't either, and I've heard more recent quotes from physicists who basically say they don't know what it is either ... I feel I'm in good company.

I accept that my tiny little money brain isn't up to the task. But I'm not the only one saying "WTF?" about string theory.

...and even more inaccurate than usual

[Roger W Moore]

There are several mistakes in the article as well. Supersymmetry is not a consequence of String Theory. It was invented to explain the huge difference between the Higgs mass and the energy scale where gravity becomes important (the fine-tuning or hierarchy problem). It was only after its invention that String Theorists realized that they needed it to make their theories work. In fact it is entirely possible that Supersymmetry exists and String Theory does not whereas the reverse is far less likely so it is wrong to say that SUSY is a consequence of String Theory.

Similarly the use of String Theory to solve non-perturbative QCD is not some new, fundamental principle but is simply a result of applying the maths developed for String Theory to a different problem. Hence studying the quark-gluon plasma is, at best, a test of some of the maths developed for String Theory but really tells us nothing at all about the physics. For a simpler analogy if you demonstrate that calculus works this does not imply that Newton's Laws of Motion are correct even though calculus was co-invented by Newton so he could write down and apply his laws.