Thanks for the explanation. What I gather from all of this is that I should probably either learn physics and the mathematics involved or stop listening to media blurbs about this subject or both.
It seems to me that what's happening is that physicists have created models that can be shown to work for certain parts of reality. That is, they can be applied with predictable outcomes in the real world.
The same models also have extreme states, where some variable switches sign or some function curve changes directions. And now they're asking, what would be the effects in the real world at these inflection points of the model?
It could well be that the model simply stops working at these points, like a variable representing the height of a person stops working once its value turns negative. It could also be that the model does work, but the semantics used for its popular description stop working.
Pretty much. Popularized descriptions already strain the edges of what could be considered correct under general relativity, and then when we throw string theory into the mix, things get even messier.
To give you a sense how bad it gets there, string theory results and arguments have to be "popularized" to an almost meaningless level just so that theoretical physicists that don't work in string theory can understand them, just because the whole field is so young and complex; filter that once more through a journalist, and you can end up with some pretty wacky claims, even if they're completely true.
I'd make no specific claims as to whether this research means anything or not, though; it's a famously speculative field, with only the barest of observable evidence to go on, and effects from pretty much every length and energy scale factor crucially into any cosmological evolution, making it all but impossible to say with any certainty that one proposed solution is better than another. This is where you start to get people arguing in terms of symmetry and beauty rather than observation, which brings physics awfully close for comfort to philosophy...
It seems to me that what's happening is that physicists have created models that can be shown to work for certain parts of reality. That is, they can be applied with predictable outcomes in the real world.
The same models also have extreme states, where some variable switches sign or some function curve changes directions. And now they're asking, what would be the effects in the real world at these inflection points of the model?
It could well be that the model simply stops working at these points, like a variable representing the height of a person stops working once its value turns negative. It could also be that the model does work, but the semantics used for its popular description stop working.