You know what we do build? Wind turbines, solar (yes, really, massive plants just went up and online), and new mega battery manufacturing plants (30 plus currently). Sodium ion batteries are now being produced and are so good that traditional battery manufacturing is at 50%, they don’t lose capacity at extreme cold temps, they don’t catch on fire in wrecks, they will outlive their owners, they scale up to home and industrial size use cases, they cost less than half traditional batteries. So maybe we fucking focus on transitioning as much as we can to electric for gods sake.

In an ideal world everyone would be completely scientifically literate and well read. In the real world we need to allow for people who don’t have the time or past education but who are interested and can get drawn in by simple titles on social media and manage to find articles that communicate science well enough to get them a foot in the door, hopefully to the point they then get into reading the actual papers. Someone could have linked the actual paper here. That title wouldn’t have drawn in newbies, it’s “Strings from almost nothing”. A novice to sciences would have little to perhaps zero idea what that means. At least this gives an idea, and it wasn’t really misleading in the way clickbait is, it was just shorthanded enough to make pedantic curmudgeons triggered enough to complain about it and rattle on with me in comments.

The title, due to a necessary brevity in how titling works on social media these days, doesn’t convey the actual meaning of the finding - they aren’t saying they found the theory in their data or observations or calculations, they’re saying in their data and observations and calculations emerged a core, defining feature of string theory. They didn’t find the theory, they found a very specific feature that is found in string theories, and that’s pretty neat.

“In a string theory framework, as you increase the energy transfer between particles, you will see a swift fall off in the probability that the particles will scatter. It’s like the particles don’t even want to scatter off one another, but rather pass freely,” Cheung says. “The scattering amplitudes don’t go to infinity. It’s better behaved.”

The researchers used this ultrasoft behavior as one of their core assumptions. They also assumed a property called “minimal zeros,” which limits the number of special points where scattering probabilities vanish.

“Remarkably, consistency requires scattering amplitudes not only to interact but also to not interact at special kinematic points called ‘zeros.’ The assumption of ‘minimal zeros’ demands the sparsest number of such vanishing points mathematically allowed by the equations,” Cheung says.

From only these assumptions, the researchers demonstrated mathematically that the resulting solutions naturally reproduced the central features of string theory, including its characteristic spectrum of particles and interaction strengths.

“The precise details of string theory emerged automatically, including the infinite tower of massive spinning particles that form the ‘harmonics’ of the string that the theory is famous for,” says co-author Grant N. Remmen (PhD ’17), the James Arthur Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University.