• Question: Will the Large Hadron Collider ever decipher the theories of String and Quantum?

    Asked by Laura Wells to Anna, George, Jodi, Rob, Stefan on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Stefan Lines

      Stefan Lines answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      I don’t think the LHC will answer many questions about String theory, since it’s pretty much untestable. It will provide, hopefully, many answers with regards to sub-atomic particles. The most publicised of these being the God Particle, which it appears we may have found.

    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Hey Laura – to test string theory with a particle detector like the LHC would require about a million times more energy than it took to detect the Higgs boson (the “God particle”)! So the LHC isn’t going to be able to do it 🙁

      It *might* be possible to test string theory by looking at gravitational orbits of astronomical objects… but the LHC doesn’t do that.

    • Photo: Rob Appleyard

      Rob Appleyard answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Quantum physics is already well understood by some scientists (…but not by me, sadly). The real questions about it are how it interacts with the physics we see at the human scale – scientists haven’t yet solved the problem of how quantum mechanics (the theory that explains the behaviour of very small things) interacts with the physics we see in the real world.

      On string theory:

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