{"id":327,"date":"2006-01-12T17:04:34","date_gmt":"2006-01-12T22:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=327"},"modified":"2006-01-24T13:43:25","modified_gmt":"2006-01-24T18:43:25","slug":"the-first-evidence-for-string-theory-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=327","title":{"rendered":"The First Evidence For String Theory? Not."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last couple years there has been a large amount of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/blog\/archives\/000037.html\">hype about cosmic strings<\/a>, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2004-06\/uocs-ndt061004.php\">press releases from Santa Barbara<\/a>, and a story in New Scientist about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=123\">The First Evidence for String Theory?<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Santa Barbara press release from June 2004 concerned a paper by Polchinski and others about potentially observable fundamental strings of cosmic size.  It stated that &#8220;LIGO&#8230; could provide support for string theory within two years.&#8221;  There are five months left for this prediction to work out.<\/p>\n<p>The New Scientist story was about an astronomical object optimistically given the name &#8220;CSL-1&#8221; (for Capodimonte-Sternberg-Lens candidate), that supposedly might be a galaxy lensed by a cosmic string, causing it to appear doubled.   Of course the much less exotic and much more likely possibility was always that it was just two similar looking neighboring galaxies.  Recently the Hubble space telescope was used to take a closer look at CSL-1, and as reported <a href=\"http:\/\/motls.blogspot.com\/2006\/01\/csl-1-is-not-cosmic-string.html\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmicvariance.com\/2006\/01\/12\/hubble-weighs-in-csl-1-not-a-cosmic-string\">here<\/a> the Hubble image clearly shows that it&#8217;s not a cosmic string, just two nearby galaxies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last couple years there has been a large amount of hype about cosmic strings, including press releases from Santa Barbara, and a story in New Scientist about The First Evidence for String Theory?. The Santa Barbara press release &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=327\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}