Eleven Dimensional Exploding Black Holes

The Grand Unified Theory, the birth of the universe, the value of the fundamental constants - you name it, and string theory promises it'll have the answer. Hell, it'll throw in the details of the Kennedy assassination and the current location of Elvis Presley if you'll just ignore the lack of provable hypotheses just a little bit longer. But after years of being the Belle of the Scientific Ball, it's starting to look like Nicole Kidman in a lab coat: beautiful, and we really enjoy the concept, but their scientific credentials are questionable.

One of the boldest but least provable claims of string theory is that there are (at least) eleven dimensions, but the seven we've strangely failed to notice so far are too tiny too observe (about a thousandth of the radius of a proton). In terms of excuses that's slightly less credible than "No my dear, I rubbed lipstick on my collar to test it before buying it for you. Which I then forgot to do while ruffling my hair and finding this strange woman in my bed."

With the backlash starting to surface and scientific journals serving "Prove it or lose it" eviction notices, string theorists are searching high and low for evidence. Cosmic background radiation, the Large Hadron Collider experiments, distortions in satellite imagery - no matter how extreme the field you'll find a stringer crying "Wait, this one proves it!" And it doesn't get much more extreme than an exploding black hole.

King MacGenius of cosmology, also known as Stephen Hawking, famously proved that energy could escape from black holes. This "Hawking Radiation" means that the galactic trash compactors, previously thought inescapable, can actually lose mass over time. Since most of them gargle stars washed down with planets this isn't a major factor, but cute little mini-singularities thought to have been created during the big bang are small enough to lose mass faster than they can gain it, and when a defect in the structure of space time shuffles off this Reimannian coil they won't go quietly. Ever the understaters, cosmologists call this process "evaporation", though a regular humans idea of evaporation don't involve an intense radiation-emitting explosion.

Scientists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the State University in Blacksburg predict that such an evaporating black hole (which might not exist) would eventually get small enough to fit into the tiny hidden dimensions (which really, really might not exist) and suddenly 'pop' in with a different kind of explosion (which has not yet been observed). We would never criticise research just because it hasn't been proven yet (we'd be scratching the Daily Galaxy into cave walls with bison thigh bones if people did), but that sounds less like "predict" than "vaguely hope".

Scientists at Cambridge and Stanford support the search, if only because the equipment used will see something interesting even if not the lottery-odds intended target, which isn't exactly the most ringing endorsement in scientific history. On the other hand, if they do prove the existence of mini-black holes and string theory with nothing but an eight-meter radio antenna, it'll be the greatest discovery of our lifetimes and we'll allow them to tattoo "Told you so" right on our foreheads.

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