“These are difficult times for the theorists,” Gian Giudice, the head of CERN’s theory department, said. “Our hopes seem to have been shattered. We have not found what we wanted.” What the world’s physicists have wanted for almost 30 years is any sign of phenomena called supersymmetry, which has hovered just out of reach like a golden apple, a promise of a hidden mathematical beauty at the core of reality.
The
Standard Model of physics has fewer than 30 independent parameters.
But according to one scientific web
site, supersymmetry has more than 100 independent parameters.
According to another page
at the same web site, more than 10,000 scientific papers “reference”
the theory of supersymmetry.
With
all that work by physicists, you would think that there must be some
evidence for supersymmetry. But efforts to find evidence for the
theory have been a complete failure. The Large Hadron Collider has
completely failed to support the theory.
Why
have physicists spent so much time on such a theory? It was to try to
explain a case in which nature seemed to be extraordinarily
fine-tuned. The wikipedia article on supersymmetry states the
following:
In
the Standard Model, the electroweak scale receives enormous
Planck-scale quantum corrections. The observed hierarchy between the
electroweak scale and the Planck scale must be achieved with
extraordinary fine tuning.
In a supersymmetric theory, on the other hand, Planck-scale quantum
corrections cancel between partners and superpartners (owing to a
minus sign associated with fermionic loops). The hierarchy between
the electroweak scale and the Planck scale is achieved in a natural
manner, without miraculous
fine-tuning.
The “miraculous fine-tuning” being talked about here
(what is known as the hierarchy problem) is a kind of matching of two
unrelated numbers so that they end up canceling each other out –
rather like what you might have if you had to pay on Friday a $5000
payment to save your house from foreclosure, and you coincidentally
won $5000 in the lottery on Friday morning.
But
this hierarchy problem is actually much more of a coincidence.
Because according to this
scientific web site, “one has to
hypothesize that the several correction terms cancel out to a part in
1034 (a hundred
billionths of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth), if one is
to make the Higgs mass smaller than a lead brick.” So maybe our
analogy should be that you own 6 houses that are each behind $5000 on
the mortgage, with Friday being the last day for you to save them;
and you coincidentally on Friday morning buy 6 different lottery
tickets that each win $5000. That's the kind of fine-tuning that
seems to be involved in the case of the hierarchy problem.
Supersymmetry (also known as SUSY) is an attempt to explain away this “miraculous fine-tuning.” But supersymmetry has always been a ridiculously ornate contrivance. For example, it imagines that almost every known type of particle has a corresponding “superpartner.” It would be quite the fantastic coincidence if nature was set up in such a way. So supersymmetry is basically a kind of gigantic case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It tries to get rid of one fine-tuned coincidence (the hierarchy problem) by introducing a whole bunch of other fine-tuned coincidences, involving all these cases in which a known type of particle happens to have a matching “superpartner” particle.
Supersymmetry (also known as SUSY) is an attempt to explain away this “miraculous fine-tuning.” But supersymmetry has always been a ridiculously ornate contrivance. For example, it imagines that almost every known type of particle has a corresponding “superpartner.” It would be quite the fantastic coincidence if nature was set up in such a way. So supersymmetry is basically a kind of gigantic case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It tries to get rid of one fine-tuned coincidence (the hierarchy problem) by introducing a whole bunch of other fine-tuned coincidences, involving all these cases in which a known type of particle happens to have a matching “superpartner” particle.
It's kind of the same
approach taken by a similar theory, the theory of cosmic inflation or
exponential expansion. That theory tries to get rid of a case of
extreme fine-tuning in the universe's first second, but it does it by
making assertions that require their own fine-tuning in numerous
ways. So it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is no real net
reduction in the amount of fine-tuning required.
For years scientists were hoping that the Large Hadron Collider would produce some evidence for supersymmetry. But no evidence has been produced. The chance of supersymmetry being confirmed in our lifetimes now seems almost zero. That's no surprise. Supersymmetry is a case of trying to explain away an example of cosmic fine-tuning, and there has never been a confirmed success in any effort to explain away any case of cosmic fine-tuning. The cosmic inflation theory (the theory of exponential expansion in the universe's first second) has been sociologically successful, a case of a thought virus that spread widely. But it has not been scientifically successful, because no evidence has been produced for it (and there are many problems with the theory).
For years scientists were hoping that the Large Hadron Collider would produce some evidence for supersymmetry. But no evidence has been produced. The chance of supersymmetry being confirmed in our lifetimes now seems almost zero. That's no surprise. Supersymmetry is a case of trying to explain away an example of cosmic fine-tuning, and there has never been a confirmed success in any effort to explain away any case of cosmic fine-tuning. The cosmic inflation theory (the theory of exponential expansion in the universe's first second) has been sociologically successful, a case of a thought virus that spread widely. But it has not been scientifically successful, because no evidence has been produced for it (and there are many problems with the theory).
Rather than investing so
much time and effort on supersymmetry, physicists would have got a
lot better return if they had invested instead in super heroes.
There are several ways physicists could have done that. The first
way would have been to invest in physics technologies that might have
given us high-tech gadgets that would allow someone to have the
equivalent of a comic super-power. Physicists might have invented
some fancy gadget that would give some of the powers of Batman's
utility belt. Or they might have invested in some bullet-stopping
force field that might have worked kind of like Wonder Woman's
bracelets. Or physicists might have invested in some super-strong
material that would give someone some of the powers of Spider Man or
Iron Man.
Or, physicists could
simply have invested in super heroes without doing any research. They
could have taken all that money wasted on supersymmetry papers, and
invested the money by either buying super hero comic books, or
investing in companies such as Marvel that published comic books.
Comic books have long been collector's items, and a comic book which
sold for 12 cents back in the 1960's may sell for hundreds of dollars
today. Disney paid 4 billion dollars for Marvel Entertainment. If
physicists had invested in super hero comic books or the companies
that published them, the physicists could have made gigantic returns
for themselves or for the colleges or universities where they work.
I must confess that I
myself am guilty of failing to see how much money could be made from
comic books and from another collector's item: baseball cards. When
I lived in a dull Maryland suburb in the early 1960's, I had lots of
comic books and many baseball cards. In the suburb I lived,
elementary school students were preoccupied with baseball cards. The
kids would gamble the cards in various ways, which made a fun
pastime. One game worked like this: you would take your stack of
cards, and face your friend who also had a stack of cards. After each
of you shuffled your stack, both of you would deal them into a common
stack. First you would deal a card, then your friend. If your friend
dealt a card with one top color bar, and you then dealt a card on top
of that stack with the same color bar, you would win the entire stack
that had been dealt.
In my suburb it seemed
every family with boys had a cardboard box of baseball cards. But
when I was eleven I moved to a very different environment: the more
sophisticated locale of Washington D.C. Of course, I packed my comic
books and baseball cards, and I hoped the kids there would be as
interested in these as the kids in my Maryland suburb. But it seemed
that none of the Washington children had the slightest interest in
baseball cards. And they didn't seem too interested in comic books.
I kind of thought to myself: I guess the city kids are too
sophisticated for these things – maybe they're just silly suburb
things. So not very long after moving to Washington D.C, I threw
away all my baseball cards and comic books. What a mistake! I could
have made thousands if I had kept them.
Whether children at a
particular school gamble with baseball cards is a sociological
consideration, a vogue of a particular locale. When groundless
theories such as supersymmetry become all the rage among little
academic tribes, it seems to be also a sociological consideration, a
case of some vogue that went viral when it shouldn't have.
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