He nevertheless cautions that there is still a chance that someone may find a robust way to achieve inflation in string theory in the future.Īnother inflation pioneer, Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California, US, is more critical of the work, however. “It could mean they are completely incompatible, which would force us to abandon at least one of them.” Dark energy “I think the fact that it is difficult to combine inflation and string theory is very interesting,” he told New Scientist. Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University in New Jersey, US, who helped to pioneer the theory of inflation, says the findings are in agreement with work that he and others have done using other versions of string theory. “But since we haven’t performed a complete search involving more complicated extra dimensions, we don’t know.” “I don’t want to run around saying, ‘Oh no, there’s no inflation in string theory,'” he told New Scientist. He stresses that it could still be possible to robustly produce inflation within string theory. But Hertzberg says all of them leave some room for doubt, because not all of the details that underpin them have been verified with complete calculations, though progress has been made in this direction. Many inflation scenarios have been proposed within more complex versions of string theory. But they found that the conditions needed for inflation appear to be impossible to achieve in these simple versions. The team tried to produce inflation in three versions of string theory in which the extra dimensions are shaped like a doughnut – the simplest possibility. The study was carried out by a team of researchers led by Mark Hertzberg of MIT in Cambridge, US. Now, a new study suggests it may be difficult to reconcile string theory with the widely accepted theory of inflation, which explains several key cosmological observations – such as why the universe appears to have the same properties in whichever direction astronomers look. Though there are many different versions of string theory, all posit that elementary particles are actually tiny vibrating strings, and that the universe contains extra spatial dimensions beyond the three that we can see. String theory is a leading contender for the “theory of everything”, which would unify all the forces of physics in one framework. The work suggests squaring string theory with the well-accepted notion of inflation will be challenging at best – and some even say that one or both theories may have to be abandoned. String theory is having trouble producing inflation – the rapid expansion of space thought to have occurred in the early universe – at least in some of the theory’s simplest incarnations, according to a new study.
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