"We're Like Deer in the Headlights": Physicists Learn No Lessons From Their Failed Wild Goose Chases

A theory called supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in a previous article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in the Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

All attempts to verify the theory of supersymmetry have failed.  The Large Hadron Collider failed to find any of the "superpartner" particles predicted by supersymmetry theory.  In a recent article in the New York Times, physicist Maria Spiropulu comments on the dismal failure of supersymmetry theory.  Referring to the "supersymmetrical particles" predicted by supersymmetry theory, which physicists wasted endless hours speculating about, without ever discovering, she says this:

"That has been a little bit crushing; for 20 years I’ve been chasing the supersymmetrical particles. So we’re like deer in the headlights: we didn’t find supersymmetry, we didn’t find dark matter as a particle."  

There was a very important lesson to be learned from all the vast amount of time physicists wasted on supersymmetry theory. The lesson is that when nature presents us with a case of very precise fine-tuning (such as we have in the Higgs Boson/Higgs Mass), then we should just accept that purposeful-seeming fine tuning in nature and maybe ponder the philosophical implications of such fine tuning, rather than wasting endless hours twisting ourselves into knots trying to explain away the fine tuning, and sweep it under the rug. There is no sign that our physicists have learned this important lesson.  

In the same article, we hear from emeritus professor of physics Michael Turner.  Turner shows zero signs of having learned any lessons from the gigantic failure of supersymmetry theory and string theory (which is based on supersymmetry theory, but has many more speculations). Between 1980 and 2020 physicists wrote many thousands of papers on supersymmetry theory and string theory. All evidence thus far suggests such efforts were a waste of time, and no evidence exists for such theories.  But when asked about string theory, Turner simply says this: "We will have to wait and see what comes from string theory, but I think it will be big."  No lesson has been learned here.  It's like an old person who wasted half of his life searching for the Abominable Snowman saying, "But one day we'll get some evidence for it!"

A recent article at the Ars Technica site gives us the real scoop on string theory. The article is entitled "Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything." We read this:

"Despite decades of work, it [string theory] has failed to deliver on its promise. What went wrong, and where do we go from here?...The whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like 'Beyond Supersymmetry' and 'Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.'  Where does that leave string theory? ....Without supersymmetry, string theory isn’t gone, but it’s certainly on life support."

The New York Times writer asks Turner about grand unification theories, one of the biggest failed wild goose chases of physicists. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on this topic, and no successful grand unification theory has emerged. The New York Times writer asks, "Where are we on unification?" Turner gives us a circuitous answer that shows no signs he is even aware of the grand flop that grand unification theories were. No lesson seems to have been learned here.  The New York Times writer later suggests how big the failure was by later asking, "If unification is the wrong question, what is the right one?"

Ideas such as grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory and string theory are ideas that all gained popularity because of what has been called a snowball effect: a sociological effect by which ideas in academia gain more and more acceptance for a while, picking up followers, funding and attention like a rolling snowball picks up snow as it rolls down a snowy mountain. The diagram below illustrates the idea:

A theory can greatly benefit from such a snowball effect, but the end result is usually nasty, as illustrated by the visual below:

The charts below (made using the Google Books Ngram viewer) shows the failure of grand unification theories and supersymmetry theory. We see a great spike of interest around 1985, with a steady decline: just what we would expect from theories that did not succeed.

Asked about the multiverse (the groundless speculation that there are countless other universes), Turner says this:

"I think we have to deal with it, even though it sounds crazy. And the multiverse gives me a headache; not being testable, at least not yet, it isn’t science. But it may be the most important idea of our time. It’s one of the things on the table. Headache or not, we have to deal with it. It needs to go up or out; either it’s part of science or it isn’t part of science."

That sounds very "deer in the headlights." But perhaps we should use a stronger phrase of disparagement to describe what string theorists did regarding the multiverse. They calculated there were maybe 10 to the 500th power "solutions" to their string theory equations, and then they started suggesting that maybe all these hypothetical universes really exist. It's like some Aquaman novelist calculating there are a quintillion different possible versions of his Aquaman story, and then concluding that this means there are a quintillion universes, each with its own different version of Aquaman. Reasoning like that is the opposite of science. 

Next in the article Turner is asked this:

"Why is it considered a triumph that the standard model of cosmology doesn’t say what 95 percent of the universe is? Only 5 percent of it is atomic material like stars and people; 25 percent is some other 'dark matter,' and about 70 percent is something even weirder — Mike has named it 'dark energy' — that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate."

Completely failing to see the failure of a theoretical program in which it is claimed that 95% of the universe is mysterious never-observed substances (dark energy and dark matter), corresponding to no known particles, Turner merely says this: 

"That’s a big success, yeah. We’ve named all the major components."

The New York Times writer then replies: "But you don't know what most of them are."  We again seem to get a "deer in the headlights" impression.  The New York Times article rather gives us the impression that today's particle physicists may be lost in the woods.  But at least there is one hopeful sign: the New York Times reporter is asking some tough questions, rather than just throwing the usual softball questions.

A story a few days ago on the www.phys.org illustrates some of the lamentable tendencies of modern theoretical physics and cosmology. We have a headline which is another example in which the wildest and most implausible of speculations is passed off as a discovery, the headline being "The bubbling universe: A previously unknown phase transition in the early universe."  We read this:

" 'But if we trust the observations and calculations, we must accept that our current model of the universe cannot explain the data, and then we must improve the model. Not by discarding it and its success so far, but by elaborating on it and making it more detailed so that it can explain the new and better data,' said Martin S. Sloth, adding, 'It appears that a phase transition in the dark energy is the missing element in the current Standard Model to explain the differing measurements of the universe's expansion rate.' "

So now they're speculating not just about dark energy, but bubbling dark energy that underwent a phase transition like liquid water turning into steam? It's like saying, "My zombie theory doesn't work, but I can fix it by making it a theory of shape-shifting zombies." A good lesson to learn from the failure to detect dark matter and dark energy and "superpartner" particles: spend more time studying things that can actually be observed rather than spending so much time on hypotheticals that no one has observed. 

Postscript: A search on the Inspire database shows more than 68,000 papers written on the topic of supersymmetry:

That's many millions or billions of dollars of federal funding, down the drain.  On the same site we can get some evidence that physicists are paying attention to the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. A search for "fine-tuning" shows 4000+ papers. 

A more specific search for "cosmic fine-tuning" shows 400+ papers: