SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the unterminated-strings-cause-inflation dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Our universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension
According to string theory, all matter consists of tiny, vibrating "stringlike" entities. The theory also requires there to be more spatial dimensions than the three that are already part of everyday knowledge. For 15 years, there have been models in string theory that have been thought to give rise to dark energy. However, these have come in for increasingly harsh criticism, and several researchers are now asserting that none of the models proposed to date are workable.
In their article, the scientists propose a new model with dark energy and our Universe riding on an expanding bubble in an extra dimension. The whole Universe is accommodated on the edge of this expanding bubble. All existing matter in the Universe corresponds to the ends of strings that extend out into the extra dimension. The researchers also show that expanding bubbles of this kind can come into existence within the framework of string theory. It is conceivable that there are more bubbles than ours, corresponding to other universes.
Journal Reference:
Souvik Banerjee, Ulf Danielsson, Giuseppe Dibitetto, Suvendu Giri, Marjorie Schillo. Emergent de Sitter Cosmology from Decaying Anti–de Sitter Space. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 121 (26) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.261301
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 30 2018, @10:13PM
I made a point in distinguishing between GR and quantum mechanics, on one side, and string theory on the other.
I didn't decide I don't like string theory (in fact I would love to have the time to learn it properly). I am saying that we have limited resources, and currently our best and brightest are busy trying to solve a nonproblem. They have beautiful math that can describe everything, and absolutely no empirical method to pin down the description enough in order for it to be useful.
Either come up with a theory that is descriptive, or start working on other problems (that humanity is having), because the theory you have now does not describe the real world. At best, it describes many worlds and ours is one of them (and we have no way of telling which) --- which essentially means it's not a theory of our world.
Here's a different way to put it. It's wrong in the particulars, but mainly right: I have a opaque box with billiard balls inside.
You can make an infinity of correct theories of how the balls interact based on their color, all of them correctly predicting how the box reacts to outside inputs, all of them incompatible, all of them predicting different things that will happen when we finally have a knife sharp enough to cut the box. But if nobody is working on sharpening the knife, all of those theories are useless.