Physicists propose test for loop quantum gravity

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)

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.