Gamma Ray Anomaly Could Test String Theory

exploder writes "String theory is notorious for its lack of testable predictions. But if the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team's interpretation is correct, then a delay in the arrival of higher-energy gamma rays could point to a breakdown of relativity theory. A type of 'quantum lensing effect' is postulated to cause the delay, which is approximately four minutes over a half-billion year journey." Ars's writeup is a little more fleshed-out than the Scientific American blog posting.

Not specific to String Theory

[E++99]

While this is great research, even if it can be demonstrated that the higher energy particles traveled faster, this is not a prediction specific to String Theories, but as the arstechnica.com article points out, this is common to most quantum gravity theories. Still, it would be an awesome thing to prove.

correction

[Fry-kun]

the ars article says 3-4 seconds, not minutes

Relativity's Dead

[einsteindotcubed]

There is no need to confirm a breakdown of relativity. We already know that it is, at the least, incomplete, if not incorrect. Albert Einstein himself saw this, and was on his own quest for a "theory of everything" in his later years. String theory should become fully "testable" with the startup of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider, part of CERN) in May of 2008. Hopefully we may find proof for the God particle, also known as the Higgs boson. In any case, tremendous amounts of data will be reaped from this machine, and we may very well prove or at least expand upon string theory. (We could also completely disprove it, but I'm trying to be optimistic.)

No no no

[Henry V .009]

There is a need to confirm a breakdown of relativity. It's an incredibly well-supported theory that predicts things on cosmic scales down to the Hydrogen atom.

The Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model, not String theory. String theory will be no more testable with LHC than it ever was. It's not even wrong.

Re:String "theory"

[JetJaguar]

Actually, there are a great many phenomena that string theory explains, the subject of this story, for example is potentially one of them, there's also some things about black holes (like Hawking radiation) which string theory predicts, but other theories also predict Hawking radiation.... plus there's a whole host of things that it predicts that occur at very high energies. But that's essentially the problem with string theory. The kind of things string theory predicts that would confirm it require energies that we are simply incapable of achieving, and the more mundane predictions made by string theory also happen to match predictions by competing non-string theories, making it pretty much impossible for string theory to distinguish itself using modern technologies.

That being said, I think string theory is beautiful, however, it could very well turn out to be the most beautiful theory of physics ever constructed as well as the biggest dead end.

Re:Layman Alert.

[The_Wilschon]

I don't know the details here, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the 4.5 minute variation in travel time (or possibly 3-4 second... depends on which article you read) even over a 4.5 billion year journey would correspond to a bump in the road the size of the Matterhorn... In other words, the travel time varies hardly at all (perhaps microseconds, usually) even for very large road bumps, so a variation on this scale is statistically significant. Once again, I don't know the details of this particular experiment, so I can't say for sure. But I do know how physics is usually done, and what I have suggested above is a quite reasonable thing to suppose, given that knowledge.

Re:Correction,experiment will test the standard mo

[glitch23]

If the string theory model fails, it will be replaced with a newer, better version of string theory, with bountiful opportunities for new books, conferences, papers, and maybe even some derivative specialities of study.

String theory doesn't really exist anymore or at least it is old news. String theory turned into superstring theory. Then there came to be multiple string theories that were very similar. About a decade ago Edward Witten created M theory [wikipedia.org] by reconciling the 5 string theory variations that existed. Maybe I'm wrong but my view is that M theory is the leading edge. I just got done reading Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos so it is pretty fresh in my mind but Wikipedia helped me remember a few things just now.

Re:Not specific to String Theory

[suv4x4]

Unless it turns out that there is some sort of mass in the medium, in which case the relativity is still fine.

Well, there's some mass in the medium: the vacuum in the outer space isn't perfect. In fact no perfect vacuum exists.

Relativists could argue this is enough for an effect of 4 min slowdown over 500 million years long travel.