
Physicists propose test for loop quantum gravity - joeyespo
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-physicists-loop-quantum-gravity.html
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ssivark
I know a li'l bit of physics, so I'll add my two cents. Most such articles
(including this one) are overly hyped. While the findings might be interesting
to another theoretical physicist working in the same area, it's a long while
before such things are of any relevance to the public... for the calculations
might have mistakes or subtleties; quite possible since people don't
understand things fully and we're trying to discover new physics.

With regards to the actual feasibility of such a test, let me say this: It's
taken us about half a century to "probably" identify a couple of black holes.
Trying to find a few that were created early enough to be evaporating now and
then observing their radiation signature seems to be an extremely long shot.
The article also claims that the method needs "enough" black holes, which I'm
guessing is more than a few. We're talking of things which occur on
astronomical time scales. Since our current technology lets us look only in
our near neighbourhood (in space and time) i.e. not too far away and not too
far back in time, we need to be extremely lucky to be able to verify that
claim. And that would be an understatement.

PS: Hawking radiation is a semi-classical calculation of how black holes must
radiate. So pretty much everybody working in related areas knows that the
exact radiation observed will be slightly different due to corrections coming
from "quantum mechanics done right". That's nothing new. This paper gives one
such scheme of corrections and claims that this is a distinguishing feature of
loop quantum gravity. (As stated in the article; I can't verify that claim)

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Georgehoot
I have noticed that many theoretical physics stories that are upvoted to the
front page, have no comments for much longer than other stories, and fewer
comments overall. I wonder if this is because people simply don't know about
the subject matter enough to create discussion, possibly fear of being wrong,
or uninterest in the discussion.

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DarkShikari
Even as a non-physics-major, stories like this tend to be terribly lacking in
meat. The article says almost nothing about the topic: only a general
description, without any technical information or exactly what the theorized
effect on Hawking radiation is.

As a hacker, a story that says "scientist invents/discovers new thing" is
completely uninteresting to me unless it actually makes an effort to explain
the new thing. If it does little more than state the discovery/invention, it's
news, not science, and can't teach me anything.

