Alt text:
==COSMOLOGY==> 'Uhhh ... how sure are we that everything is made of these?'
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
719 points (99.0% liked)
xkcd
8836 readers
95 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I thought the problem with string theory is that its predictions match up with what the standard model already explains. Maybe that’s only for the things we have the capability to mature any time soon.
No, the problem is very different. In string theory you have a lot of freedom to build various models, and they can provide the standard model, slight deviations from it, or something completely different. Before LHC we knew we had some version of the standard model, the hope was that the LHC would find that we have some particular deviation, like supersymmetry (susy) with such-and-such masses and particles. It did not. The prediction is susy, the problem is that the prediction (at least yet) is not exactly this type of susy. String theory says there is supposed to be a lot of extra stuff beyond the standard model, question is just how do you find it, which is made harder by string theory allowing for so many models.