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string theory

Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy

Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally incompatible with our current understanding of “dark energy” — but only with “dark energy” can we explain the accelerated expansion of our current universe. Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology quickly realized something odd about this conjecture: it seemed to be incompatible with the existence of the Higgs particle. His calculations, which he carried out together with theorists from Columbia University in New Read More ›

Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, explains, Three weeks ago, Steinhauer’s group reported results from a new experiment in which they have now measured the temperature of the fluid black hole: Observation of thermal Hawking radiation at the Hawking temperature in an analogue black hole Juan Ramón Muñoz de Nova, Katrine Golubkov, Victor I. Kolobov, Jeff Steinhauer arXiv:1809.00913 [gr-qc] While the measurement is not very exact owing to the noise in the system, the result agrees with Hawking’s prediction, at least to the precision that the experiment allows to identify a temperature to begin with. The authors also point out in the paper that they see no evidence of a black hole firewall. A black hole Read More ›

Researchers: Either dark energy or string theory is wrong. Or both are.

Dark energy. Even the name is intriguing. Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already? But the evidence base is getting murkier all the time. The conjecture, if true, would mean the density of dark energy in our universe cannot be constant, but must instead take a form called “quintessence” — an energy source that will gradually diminish over tens of billions of years. Several telescope experiments are underway now to more precisely probe whether the universe is expanding with a constant rate of acceleration, which would mean that as new space is created, a proportionate amount of new dark energy arises with it, or whether the cosmic acceleration is gradually changing, as in quintessence models. A discovery of quintessence would Read More ›