So far, string theory has defied experiments, but Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks he has found a way to put the idea to the test. Geoff Brumfiel finds out how. Ask most theorists when they think their calculations will be tested experimentally and you'll be told "decades" or sometimes, more honestly, "never". But ask Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at Harvard University, and he will give you a far closer date: 2008. That is when the first results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, are expected to be released by CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. And if Arkani-Hamed's predictions are correct, then that is when an experiment will detect the first evidence to support string theory — a vision of the cosmos that has never been verified experimentally. "The field is going to turn on what happens at the collider," he says.
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