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Chapter 9

The Smoking Gun: Experimental Signatures

Nothing would please string theorists more than to proudly present the world with a list of detailed, experimentally testable
predictions. Certainly, there is no way to establish that any theory describes our world without subjecting its predictions to
experimental verification. And no matter how compelling a picture string theory paints, if it does not accurately describe our
universe, it will be no more relevant than an elaborate game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Edward Witten is fond of declaring that string theory has already made a dramatic and experimentally confirmed prediction:
"String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity." 67 What Witten means by this is that both Newton and Einstein
developed theories of gravity because their observations of the world clearly showed them that gravity exists, and that, therefore, it
required an accurate and consistent explanation. On the contrary, a physicist studying string theory—even if he or she was
completely unaware of general relativity—would be inexorably led to it by the string framework. Through its massless spin-2
graviton pattern of vibration, string theory has gravity thoroughly sewn into its theoretical fabric. As Witten has said, "the fact that
gravity is a consequence of string theory is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever."68 In acknowledging that this "prediction"
is more precisely labeled a "postdiction" because physicists had discovered theoretical descriptions of gravity before they knew of
string theory, Witten points out that this is a mere accident of history on earth. In other advanced civilizations in the universe,
Witten fancifully argues, it is quite possible that string theory was discovered first, and a theory of gravity found as a stunning
consequence.

Since we are bound to the history of science on our planet, there are many who find this postdiction of gravity unconvincing
experimental confirmation of string theory. Most physicists would be far happier with one of two things: a bona fide prediction
from string theory that experimentalists could confirm, or a postdiction of some property of the world (like the mass of the electron
or the existence of three families of particles) for which there is currently no explanation. In this chapter we will discuss how far
string theorists have gone toward reaching these goals.

Ironically, we will see that although string theory has the potential to be the most predictive theory that physicists have ever
studied—a theory that has the capacity to explain the most fundamental of nature's properties—physicists have not as yet been able
to make predictions with the precision necessary to confront experimental data. Like a child who receives his or her dream gift for
Christmas but can't quite get it to work because a few pages of the instructions are missing, today's physicists are in possession of
what may well be the Holy Grail of modern science, but they can't unleash its full predictive power until they succeed in writing
the full instruction manual. Nevertheless, as we discuss in this chapter, with a bit of luck, one central feature of string theory could
receive experimental verification within the next decade. And with a good deal more luck, indirect fingerprints of the theory could
be confirmed at any moment.

Crossfire

Is string theory right? We don't know. If you share the belief that the laws of physics should not be fragmented into those that
govern the large and those that govern the small, and if you also believe that we should not rest until we have a theory whose range
of applicability is limitless, string theory is the only game in town. You might well argue, though, that this highlights only
physicists' lack of imagination rather than some fundamental uniqueness of string theory. Perhaps. You might further argue that,
like the man searching for his lost keys solely under a street light, physicists are huddled around string theory merely because the
vagaries of scientific history have shed one random ray of insight in this direction. Maybe. And, if you're either relatively
conservative or fond of playing devil's advocate, you might even say that physicists have no business wasting time on a theory that
postulates a new feature of nature some hundred million billion times smaller than anything we can directly probe experimentally.

If you voiced these complaints in the 1980s when string theory first made its splash, you would have been joined by some of the
most respected physicists of our age. For instance, in the mid-1980s Nobel Prize-winning Harvard physicist Sheldon Glashow,
together with physicist Paul Ginsparg, then also at Harvard, publicly disparaged string theory's lack of experimental accessibility:

67
Edward Witten, "Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime" Physics Today, April 1996, p. 24.
68
Interview with Edward Witten, May 11, 1998.