String theory topoogy can change lead to experimentally testable predictions?

[ensabah6]

Witten argues one of string theories great achievements is that it shows that topology can change.

Which is fine, but is there any observational evidence (i.e from astronomy or HEP) or any experimentally testable predictions on topology changing? Is there any physical evidence for topology changing? What if topology does not change in physical reality, but string theory says topology does change, does this mean string theory is wrong?

 

[Fra]

I don't know what Witten said and I'm not into string theory, but that said I have a couple of spontaneous comments that though has nothing to do with strings.

1) That toplogoy can change, but wether it does is another story. As long as we don't know, why ban the possibility?

2) From the point of view of the scientific meothod, how does a scientist or even a general observer _inform himself_ and induce or deduce the topology in the first place? Shouldn't the topology somehow be emergent from processing the information collected from observation? In this perspective, I would expect topology to be dynamical and emergent from interactions with the environment. How did we come to the current conclusion about topology?

I don't think putting topology as background structure should be necessary. I see the topology as well as the geometry as art of the dynamical reference. But I also think that a sensible model should be able to provide a rating of the possible topologies. I think something is wrong if a space of possibilities is generated without a prior. I don't understand how that can happen because it would suggest that the option space is redundant - it contains no information, so it should collapse back to where it came from IMO.

/Fredrik