“It depends who you ask,” says Suddhasattwa Brahma, a cosmologist at McGill University. The most promising road to doing so-the so-called KKLT construction-does not convince everyone. Theorists have had difficulty, though, showing how, or if, inflation works in string theory. The process magnified random blips in the quantum vacuum and converted them into the galaxies and other stuff around us. The theory says that the early universe went through a phase of extreme expansion. Inflation explains how, in a sense, we got everything in the universe from nothing. “Inflation is the most compelling explanation for why our universe looks the way it does and where the structure came from,” says Marilena Loverde, a physicist at Stony Brook University. And string theory, it turns out, has a persistent problem describing the most popular account of what went on during the universe’s earliest moments after the big bang: inflation. One way to rule out the idea is if we can prove that it does not predict an essential feature of the universe. What it comes down to is this question: Does the universe show us all of its quantum secrets, or does it somehow hide those details from our classical eyes? Because if the details can be seen, string theory might not be able to explain them. Now some scientists say we may have a way to do exactly that, thanks to a new conjecture that pits string theory against cosmic expansion. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments. Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything.
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