Tuesday, February 17, 2009

String Theory Predicts An Experimental Result

Symmetry Breaking writes A first: String theory predicts an experimental result. This doesn't prove string theory at all but it is something worthwhile.

I don't really understand this but stuff like this sounds fun:

"The tale begins in 2002, when researchers in John Thomas’s JETLab group at Duke University announced that they had created a super-cooled gas of lithium 6 atoms that behaved like a fluid; see their paper here (subscription required.) They did this, Thomas explained, by trapping about 300 million lithium 6 atoms in a tiny, cigar-shaped bowl of laser light. At this point the atoms look like a little red ball, visible in a photo he flashed on the screen. Then they hit the ball of atoms with a carbon-dioxide laser beam. The atoms started banging into each other and quickly evaporated. This cools them–something we’re all familiar with from getting chilly as our sweat dries–until they reach a temperature of about a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At this point the blob of atoms began acting strangely. Laser flash photos showed that it expanded but only in one direction, and in a way characteristic of flowing liquid. In technical terms, they had created the first strongly interacting Fermi gas."

Apparently they created a new form of matter and string theorists were able to predict some of the properties. Pretty cool.

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