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Comment by noone_important | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure what you are refering to. You absolutely can break Lorentz Invariance in string theory[1]. There is a reason why even some string theory researchers call it the theory of anything.

[1] https://inspirehep.net/literature/262241

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Wellllll. Despite the title, the paper does not make a claim about string theory. The starting point is the "Witten string field theory" which is a field theory engineered to have properties like string theory. Nothing guarantees that theory is exactly like string theory. In addition, the idea is perturbative in nature, there's no guarantee that perturbative effects are in fact realized in the full quantum theory - exoteric cancellations happen often in field theories with many symmetries. This is two degrees of questionable.

So A) the paper isn't actually about string theory and B) it's not clear that the claim it makes is actually correct for the field theory it supposedly applies to.

Well this is just an early example of the lorentz breaking string theory niche. You can find a lot more. In the short time frame where opera had this supposedly faster than light neutrinos, a lot of papers were published in that regard.

For example you can have string theories that lead to finsler spacetimes, which were used to explain the opera results.

I literally have no idea what our conversation has to do with opera results, or what you think that shows, but just lost all interest in continuing this conversation.

People are not likely to look for unphysical models, if they're trying to do physics. The connection is social.

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