Physical reality of string theory demonstrated
July 6, 2009String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden (The Netherlands) theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon. Their discovery has been reported in Science Express.
'This is superb. I have never experienced such euphoria.' Jan Zaanen makes no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. Together with Mihailo Cubrovic and Koenraad Schalm, he has successfully managed to shed light on a previously unexplained natural phenomeon using the mathematics of string theory.
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical state, that plays a role in high-temperature super-conductivity. Super-conductivity at high temperatures has long been a 'hot issue' in physics. In super-conductivity, discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden, electrons can zoom through a material without meeting any resistance. In the first instance, this only seemed possible at very low temperatures close to absolute zero, but more and more examples are coming up where it also occurs at higher temperatures. So far, nobody has managed to explain high temperature super-conductivity. Zaanen: 'It has always been assumed that once you understand this quantum-critical state, you can also understand high temperature super-conductivity. But, although the experiments produced a lot of information, we hadn't the faintest idea of how to describe this phenomenon.' String theory now offers a solution.
This is the first time that a calculation based on string theory has been published in Science, even though the theory is widely known. 'There have always been a lot of expectations surrounding string theory,' Zaanen explains, having himself studied the theory to satisfy his own curiosity. 'String theory is often seen as a child of Einstein that aims to devise a revolutionary and comprehensive theory, a kind of 'theory of everything'. Ten years ago, researchers even said: 'Give us two weeks and we'll be able to tell you where the big bang came from. The problem of string theory was that, in spite of its excellent maths, it was never able to make a concrete link with the physical reality - the world around us.'
But now, Zaanen, together with his colleagues Cubrovic and Schalm, are trying to change this situation, by applying string theory to a phenomenon that physicists, including Zaanen, have for the past fifteen years been unable to explain: the quantum-critical state of electrons. This special state occurs in a material just before it becomes super-conductive at high temperature. Zaanen describes the quantum-critical state as a 'quantum soup', whereby the electrons form a collective independent of distances, where the electrons exhibit the same behaviour at small quantum mechanical scale or at macroscopic human scale.
Because of Zaanen's interest in string theory, he and string theoreticist Koenraad Schalm soon became acquainted after Schalm's arrival in Leiden. Zaanen had an unsolved problem and Schalm was an expert in the field of string theory. Their common interest brought them together, and they decided to work jointly on the research. They used the aspect of string theory known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This allows situations in a large relativistic world to be translated into a description at minuscule quantum physics level. This correspondence bridges the gap between these two different worlds. By applying the correspondence to the situation where a black hole vibrates when an electron falls into it, they arrived at the description of electrons that move in and out of a quantum-critical state.
After days and nights of hard grind, it was a puzzle that fitted. 'We hadn't expected it to work so well,' says a delighted Zaanen. 'The maths was a perfect fit; it was superb. When we saw the calculations, at first we could hardly believe it, but it was right.' Gateway to more
Although the mystery of high temperature super-conductivity isn't fully resolved, the findings do show that major problems in physics can be addressed using string theory. And this is just the start, Zaanen believes. 'AdS/CFT correspondence now explains things that colleagues who have been beavering away for ages were unable to resolve, in spite of their enormous efforts. There are a lot of things that can be done with it. We don't fully understand it yet, but I see it as a gateway to much more.' The fact that Science was keen to publish this discovery early confirms this.
More information: String Theory, Quantum Phase Transitions, and the Emergent Fermi Liquid Mihailo Cubrovic, Jan Zaanen, and Koenraad Schalm Published online July 2 2009; 10.1126/science.1174962 (Science Express Research Articles)
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Source: Leiden University
Sep 14, 2005 |
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Until then, everything, including this article about super-strings remains theory only.
Also, I don't think the use in describing an emergent phenomena is evidence for strings themselves any more than emergent chemistry is evidence for quarks. If anything, this article will be used as another one of those mythical "promises made that have not been lived up to".
Time to hedge my bets!
[face_puke]
How much credit does it lend towards the M theory?
Beautiful aphorism. Thanks.
This is the first thing that string theory can resolve that defies other explanations. But that doesn't make string theory true, only possible. More cases like this, however, will really bolster its standing as the right way to go.
Of course, now we have to ask: WHICH string theory is the right one?
Just as successfully using metric tensor to solve economic problem does not give support to general relativity so this result does nothing to support string theory as a fundamental theory of all interactions.
So science is based on elegance?
Science IS elegance.
Nothing is more elegant than a knowledge system based on nothing else but falsifiability.
I don't see anything in this article indicating that string theory made a prediction which was then experimentally proven.
Anyway, didn't 3 papers get printed last month showing that separating time and space allowed them to get rid of string theory?
http://arstechnic...sics.ars
So its amazing that they could actually get a solution. If it works for other phenomena they've got to explain WHY it works.
Tell that to John Nash.
Very good points that are always ignored by string dreamers...
Personally I also find it difficult to believe in quarks and nuclear forces as long as their existences have never been demonstrated.
http://www.classi...spot.com
For example, whole years scientists believed by mistake, aether theory is BS. Now we know, not the aether concept, but aether refusal was wrong. What does such experience mean for scientific method? It just means, Poppers methodology is symmetric and every decision (both positive, both negative) must be tested thoroughly.
Unfortunately The String Hypothesis doesn't appear to be falsifiable due the exceptionally large number of String Theories that are possible.
So it sure isn't based on falsifiability,
Ethelred
Due the redundancy o postulates string theory is behaving like loose table: the contradicting terms are making noise and singularities in equations, which leads to landscape of 10E 500 possible solutions and lost of predictability and falsifiability.
Analogous problem is in fact relevant even for loop quantum gravity and all formal theories, based on well minded, but blind combinations of relativity and quantum mechanics, because postulates of these theories aren't compatible each other. String theory is just one of simplest examples.
Well, I'm not in a position to be able to pretend that I know everything.
Therefore, it's not possible for me to exchange arguments with people in that position.
Haste makes waste, isn't it?
When Leonardo da Vinci drafted a helicopter, the model certainly wasn't able to really fly. But the idea was not very far from reality.
For StringTheory I assume less time of development until it "really flies" and will deliver falsifiable predictions.
Aether Wave theory explains strings as a foamy density fluctuations of hypothetical dense gas, which is forming vacuum. While in superconductors electrons are heavilly compressed near holes by Coulomb forces, they behave in simmilar way, like particles on the boundary of black hole and they forms foamy fluctuations of density, we can use some string theory concepts for their description.
But string theory wasn't designed for such purposes, it was supposed to describe electron itself. While string theory failed this target apparently from obvious reasons (by AWT particles are formed by whole clouds of strings and membranes of vacuum foam, not by isolated stringy loops, as string theorists believe), the tendency to model superconductivity by AdS/CFT correspondence is just an attempt to make the best of a bad job. We should realize, how string theorists are frustrated after forty years of ST development, while still having no real physical system to describe...
AWT explains superconductivity in much more illustrative way - and if someone is interested about exact numbers here, he can simply solve classical quantum equations of large compressed particle system on computer - here's no need to integrate another abstract theory into formal description of superconductivity phenomena.
The HT superconductivity is conceptually quite simple phenomenon and no working knowledge of string theory is required for its understanding at all. String theorists shouldn't forget it when pretending, they can provide the only description of this phenomena, explanation the less.
From AWT follows, every dense cloud of compressed electrons should exhibit a superconductivity, so we should rather think about ways, how to prepare such cloud without using of expensive diamond layers and other ultrahard materials. It's rather engineering problem - how to compress slippery electrons into flat channels. It means, how to create superfluid analogy of vacuum just from charged matter? Virtually everybody can propose the right trick by now!
ill pat my dog just forget reading any of this
F(r,t)=G----
............rxr
Where is time in this formula? is the speed of gravity infinite?
So this is phenomology.
And I believe string theory is phenomology as is religion. We still don't know what to do with time.
But as long as we can use all theory to go forward I can live with it though.
But I do preffer to understand subject at least a bit - especially at the moment, when such understanding is way way easier, then the understanding of whole abstract theory about it. Without it you cannot be sure, if you're not wearing shoe, but a piece of sh*t.. In another words, you cannot be fooled by these medicinemans so easily.
Yeah, if they actually followed that ideal!!!!
Funny how scientists are still called scientists today, you'd think we'd have a more modern name for them.
And math, come on people, can't we come up with something that's not so old, like numberology, or plusandminusism? 'Math' is just so... old school.
Maybe the fact that science IS elegant has something to do with the fact that scientists, who study science, keep using the word. I wonder how often farmers use the word Season in their daily work since farming started.
When scientists start using the word 'righteous' ALL THE TIME, then I'll start getting annoyed.
I have proof that he exists. Children...behold...I am your master!
In fact space is infinite dimensional while Time is teleological.
www.innergate.org
And black holes are bullshit: http://blogs.disc...eighty/. (last comment)
I don't like superstrings:
http://groups.goo...9bb05187
http://groups.goo...898d2ad9