Massive footprints of the microscopic

While recently browsing through the archives of IT Conversations I found this great installment of Tech Nation with Brian Greene, a leading expert on Superstring Theory and the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. He talks about his two books and delivers some of his trademark analogies and metaphors for explaining the sometimes hard to grasp complexities of astrophysics. The segment of his interview that I found particularly interesting is when he talks about one of his latest ideas for detecting the existence of superstrings. Strings-if they do exist-are far to small to be witnessed directly with current technology, and even indirect methods such as particle acceleration have proven to be ineffective. Greene suggests that the evidence of strings might in-fact be visible on massive scales spread out across the cosmos. He theorizes that superstrings could have left imprints in the universe when it was condensed into an unimaginably small size just before the big-bang, and as the universe expanded, the imprints of these ancient strings expanded with it, and might still exist today spread out across the universe, detectable by patterns in temperature variations. (He uses a brilliant inflated balloon analogy to explain this)

I have to admit, it seems a bit far fetched. Particularly when you consider that the pre-big bang universe was just one homogenized molten ball of matter with nothing even suggesting the galaxies and stars that would later develop, its hard to imagine that the footprints the strings left behind could survive in a recognizable and detectable form. And if these imprints do exist it might be extremely difficult to detect the temperature patterns across vast regions of space.
But one really cant deny the beauty of this theory. I hope my skepticism turns out to be short-sighted.

Listen to Moira Gunn interview Brian Greene on Tech Nation