Other commentators saw that as too bold a leap, pointing to caveats about the way the calculation was done. “This goes along the lines that string theory is unique.” “One of the questions is if string theory is the unique theory of quantum gravity or not,” she said. Irene Valenzuela, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, agreed. “And I think this is a great first step towards that.” “The hope is that you could prove the inevitability of string theory using these methods,” said David Simmons-Duffin, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Some interpret the result as a new kind of evidence for string theory, a framework that sorely lacks even the prospect of experimental confirmation, due to the pointlike minuteness of the postulated strings. Quantum gravity theorists have been reading the tea leaves ever since. Vieira, Andrea Guerrieri of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and João Penedones of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne reported their number and the match with string theory’s prediction in Physical Review Letters in August 2021. The leading candidate for the fundamental theory of gravity and everything else, string theory holds that all elementary particles are, close-up, vibrating loops and strings. With this method, the trio found a surprising coincidence: Their bootstrapped number closely matched the prediction for the number made by string theory. To bootstrap is to deduce new facts about the world by figuring out what’s compatible with known facts - science’s version of picking yourself up by your own bootstraps. Gravity’s quantum-scale details are not something physicists usually know how to quantify, but the trio attacked the problem using an approach that has lately been racking up stunners in other areas of physics. When they saw the value, “we couldn’t believe it,” said Pedro Vieira, one of the three. Recently, three physicists calculated a number pertaining to the quantum nature of gravity.
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