72 Chapter 2: Motivation which AdS/CFT predictions are not and can not be reproduced by weakly- coupled QCD. In this sense the entropy to viscosity ratio is the worst ob- servable to use: the Frankfurt parton cascade group finds pQCD also gives η/s ∼ . 1; and the value of the ratio, due to the uncontrolled heavy ion ini- tial conditions that so strongly affect hydrodynamics results and the unknown importance of viscous effects in hydrodynamics predictions, is very poorly de- termined. Nevertheless AdS/CFT can be applied to heavy flavor jets and jet-bulk interactions, and we will find that these are falsifiable predictions qualitatively different from pQCD. Specifically AdS/CFT can be applied to the energy loss of heavy quarks propagating through a thermalized plasma [342, 343]. It turns out that the drag experienced by these quarks is independent of their momentum and in- versely proportional to their mass; this is entirely different from the logarithmic dependence on both mass and momentum found in pQCD. A major result of this thesis is to propose an experimental observable, the ratio of charm to bot- tom quark R$_{AA}$ ( p$_{T}$ ), as a robust observable for differentiating between these two theories; see Chapter 5. Another success of the AdS/CFT paradigm came from the consistency check of Mach cones produced in the bulk matter by heavy quarks propagating faster than the speed of sound, v = 1 / √ 3. It turns out though that connecting this phenomenon to the observed conical flow in dijet correlations at Rhic is highly nontrivial [353]. In fact one finds that hadronization removes all traces of a signal from any Mach wake in the plasma; the temperature variations are