It appears that some experimental evidence for superstring theory may have been found. More detailed experiments looking at this will be carrried out in the next few years. It involves seeing a double image of distant galaxies that is not by means of gravitation lensing. An area of sky has been found where there appears to be more than one double image in the same place. This could indicate a superstring close by, possibly, maybe, not totally impossible. A paper on the galaxy imaging is in (Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society, vol 343). We may finally find out if superstring theory is just a nice piece of maths or a great theory.
Maybe...but as always, I'm skeptical until all of the evidence is in. I think you have the right idea though: if we're ever going to discover the secrets of the smallest things in the universe, we paradoxically need to start observing the largest.
I agree im an experimentalist and as such quite sceptical about string theory. But this certainly looks like its worth a good long look. Either way it looks like something interesting and new.
All of these constructs, regardless of the number of dimensions, can be reduced to simple infinitely recursive reflections (polarized isotropic vectors - 'spinors'), which at once bounds at a continuous process of binary events.....self-reference. String constructs, be they symmetric, supersymmetric, flipped, or other, simply correlate over a small range of experiential phenomena. Other models correlate as well over other ranges and conditions.
My bad. I had no idea the two theories had any connection, but it should supprise me because I recently learned that in m-theory ("brane theory", whatever), the entire universe could ba a giant 11-dimensional type of superstring... Wow, the very big and the very small all in one package...I feel like a Who.
And they all lived on this little speck of dust... My favorte part: "A person's a person, no matter how small." You know, Carl Sagan once talked about the very old idea that our entire universe was just an atom in some larger universe, and how each and every atom in our universe could be a whole 'nother universe unto itself... It seems like that idea might not have been so farfetched after all. Gee, we may live in a "multiverse" of parallel and & alternate universes...which itself may just be a small part of something mush bigger...and maybe it all goes on forever, or maybe when you reach the end of it all you return to the begining...like the serpent Oborous biting it's own tail... Makes you feel kinda small, doesn't it?
Its true there are some similarities between the physical apperacne of hypothesised superstrings and cosmic strings but their origins are totally separate. i think current thinking is against cosmic strings, but something I know little about.
