• Question: How close, to being proved and no longer just a theory, is string theory?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I don’t know much about string theory, so hopefully someone else will chime in on this, but I wanted to make a comment about the word theory.

      You ask when string theory won’t be a theory any more….
      Theory means something specific in science – it means an explanation that is backed up by experiments and observations. It isn’t just an “idea”. The theory of gravity is “only a theory” but we’re aware it works in the majority of cases!

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Unfortunately, string theory is pretty far from being proved. The reason is that many of it’s main predictions (i.e. where it predicts things that other theories do not) are not testable at present. They require technology (in this case, particle accelerators with powers more than a million times higher than we have today) that isn’t available yet, and probably won’t be for another few decades.

      However, there are many clever people working on this now, so perhaps they’ll find other ways to test it. That’s the great thing about science, when something appears impossible, but someone finds a clever way around the problem.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      The trouble with string theory is that there are lots and lots of variations of the theory, but only one can be the correct one. And there aren’t always easy ways to test which one is correct, though there are experiments like the Planck satellite, which measures the light left over from just after the big bang, which can help rule some of them out. But even if we find evidence that string theory is correct, it will still be a theory, just the same as Einstein’s theory of relativity is still a theory, even though we know it works – it works better than what we had before, so it’s a better description of what we see, but it still isn’t perfect, which is why people have come up with things that might be even better, like string theory. Even if string theory does work, it’s unlikely to be absolutely perfect, because the universe is so complicated, but it would at least be more accurate than what we have at the moment!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      As Sarah, I unfortunately don’t know much about String Theory but as far as I understand, it is a pretty new theory still so may well be many decades off from being confirmed in any sense.

      This is quite typical of ‘scientific theory’ though; gravity is still a theory as Sarah has mentioned and so is Evolution in Biology and Plate Tectonics in Geology. Whilst these ideas are widely accepted among the scientific community, they are not definitive so still have to classed as ideas and therefore theories!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Many theoretical physicists believe that string theory is the ultimate theory of reality — but very little progress has been made in the past 20 years towards making string theory actually testable. That means, to figure out which experiments and observations we could do to test whether string theory is right or wrong. Unless and until that happens, we won’t know whether this is the right fundamental way of describing our Universe, or just a bunch of very beautiful, very complicated maths with no connection with reality.

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