Experimental evidence has ruled out (falsified) string theory - LQG still viable

[bananan]

here's the link

http://www.newscientist.com/channel...100-atomic-jitters-hint-at-quantum-spume.htmlin a nut shell
1- pollen in water jiggles - other small particles also jitter in solution.
2- einstein explained this as brownian motion & atoms
3- Einstein did not directly observe atoms, but inferred them from their actions on pollen

4- mass spectroscopy of different small particles (fullerens, cessium atoms) have blurring Charles Wang, of the University of Aberdeen, UK notes they are similar regardless of the kind of particle used.

5- one possible explanation is that these elementary particles are experiencing space-time jitters (others explanations ahve not been ruled out)

6- these would be quantum gravity analogue to brownian motion

7- the calculated scale by Charles Wang, of the University of Aberdeen, UK. and published is on the order of 10-25

8 string theory predicts similar effects on the scale of 10-18.string theory has been experimentally falsified if these results r reproducible. & other alternative explanations have been ruled out.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I am certainly not going to subscribe to NS to get the full article, but based on the abstract and your reportage it looks like a typical NS bait and switch; big headline, nothing much inside. Wang has a theory, but acknowledges that it's not the only one out there for this phenomenon; his theory predicts a spacetime quantum scale of 10^-25 ( 10^-25 what? meters, proton radii, what?). Some string theory says 10^-18, I guess, but when this question is asked on this board (every now and then) it turns out to be just as hard to pin SST mavens on this issue as on any other, so here again, it doesn't look like SST can be verified or falsified by Wang's results even if they themselves are not falsified.

 

[marcus]

Charles H-T. Wang of Aberdeen was not at the 2004 Loop/Foam conference Rovelli organized at Marseille and he was not at the Loops 2005conference at AEI-Potsdam.

(he was at a September 2005 conference in Corsica that a few non-string QG people attended)

He has a bunch of papers on arxiv with striking titles and abstracts, but he seems way off the beaten track, or "way out in left field"----the other LQG people do not do any followup, or cite his papers.

He seems to have his own research program that is not compatible or doesn't talk to the rest easily.

this is not to say he isn't right. I never saw any critique of Wang papers. And at any day he could hit on a brilliant idea that other people missed.

even if we can't read New Scientist, he puts stuff on arxiv so it is probably either already there or eventually will appear there

here, for example, is a recent Wang paper

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0605124
New "phase" of quantum gravity
Charles H.-T. Wang
17 pages, 6 figures, Submitted for the 2006 Triennial Issue of Phil. Trans. A of the Royal Society

(actually this tries to provide an introductory survey of usual LQG! If he goes on like this he is going to join the fold and merge in with the rest. I had only noticed his earlier more maverick papers.)

 

[bananan]

here's the original paper ithe NS article is based on

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0603/0603112.pdf

gr-qc/0603112 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Quantum gravitational decoherence of matter waves
Authors: Charles H.-T. Wang, Robert Bingham, J. Tito Mendonca
Comments: 8 pages; final version to appear in CQG as a letter
Journal-ref: Class.Quant.Grav. 23 (2006) L59-L65i want to thanks bananan for his generous donation

I am certainly not going to subscribe to NS to get the full article, but based on the abstract and your reportage it looks like a typical NS bait and switch; big headline, nothing much inside. Wang has a theory, but acknowledges that it's not the only one out there for this phenomenon; his theory predicts a spacetime quantum scale of 10^-25 ( 10^-25 what? meters, proton radii, what?). Some string theory says 10^-18, I guess, but when this question is asked on this board (every now and then) it turns out to be just as hard to pin SST mavens on this issue as on any other, so here again, it doesn't look like SST can be verified or falsified by Wang's results even if they themselves are not falsified.