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LHC Data Continues To Disagree With Supersymmetry
decora writes "Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports on another piece of evidence hitting the beleaguered Supersymmetry community. Scientists at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India confirmed that extra levels of B-Meson decay have not been found in the LHC beauty experiment. Coming on the heels of a March report in Nature, this news seems to reinforce what many have suspected all along. Dark Matter is probably not explainable through massive shadow particles like squarks and selectrons, and for all practical purposes, the Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model of Physics is dead."
Way super-symetried they are !! Not big like Taco's, but nice if I do say so myself !!
There is no Higgs Boson. - Accept it!
"Matter does not exist" - Hans-Peter Dürr http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFTuI0G0hh8
"Die Welt entsteht im Auge des Betrachters" - Humberto Maturana
There is no Higgs Boson. - Accept it! "Matter does not exist" - Hans-Peter Dürr http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFTuI0G0hh8 "Die Welt entsteht im Auge des Betrachters" - Humberto Maturana
Your mom outputs to /dev/null.
So I clicked on the wikipedia link for supersymmetric extension and tried to read the first three paragraphs.
I encountered these: "supersymmetric partners, the weak scale, the hierarchy problem, quantum corrections, a fermionic superpartner, superparticles, squarks, gluinos, neutralinos, sleptons, R-parity, explicit soft supersymmetry breaking operators, large flavor changing neutral currents and electric dipole moments."
I always knew I wanted to be diagonal in flavor space to make the new CP violating phases vanish.
There is something deeply disturbing in the heads of physicists...
Sounds like it's time for another rethink then. Einstein got his insights from observing things in the real world, a lot of modern theory seems to be based on looking at Math. Maybe it's time to spend some time in the physical world again and to step away from the Platonic realm and see if something sparks some inspiration.
I, for one, wonder what we might learn if we try to model things using integer math instead of the often rounded real numbers that seem to be popular. Of course, with the numbers being so large you run into factoring issues pretty quickly but hey, that's what quantum computers are for right? :)
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
"Seriously guys, we haven't found this subatomic particle that we have no idea if it exists or how to observe it in the first five years of the project, so it must not exist at all."
How long did they think the world was flat again? And how long before that did they believe thunder was anger from the gods? And how long before that was fire worshiped as magic?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
...the LHC itself is just an illusion!!!!11
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I seem to remember a physics colloquium speaker discussing the likely energies for the higgs-boson back in 2005-6. He made it sound unlikely that it would be seen at any of the energies created at the LHC. It could require a much, much more massive particle accelerator to find the HB.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
"Fucking Higgs Boson, why doesn't it work?"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Calling SUSY "all but dead" is overstating the case just a little. *Minimal* SUSY appears to not fit the data, but that doesn't mean another version of SUSY might be the right answer. SUSY is one of those things, like string theory, that I think a lot of physicists are going to have a tough time letting go of until they are thoroughly disproven, assuming that ever happens. The problem is we're kind of getting to the point where it's hard to test these theories since it requires energies we have no hope of ever achieving in order to investigate them experimentally, unless we are clever and find other consequences of the theory at lower energies, like the B-meson decay.
There's a range of possible supersymmetry schemes. Sure, considering minimal supersymmetry first, but if reality doesn't correspond, well, then perhaps all that's been excluded is minimal supersymmetry, the simplest possible way of extending the standard model with supersymmetry.
Secondly, and suspiciously, otherwise quite complicated-looking 32-generator extended supersymmetry theories automagically include a graviton. And we do live in a universe with gravity, after all, so, um, maybe minimal supersymmetry was never the most likely really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_supersymmetry
In other news, ok this is what happening, my parents are out with family friends, and theyll be back any minute so i need your help see, i volunteer on my sister's softball team (im 22 the girls are 15) and whatever, i met this girl, her name is Alison, and were going out for a while. We have a lot in common, and sometimes i help her with homework. i helped her with her english essay and she still got a D... this is because her teacher is a prick... anywayz so she came over like an hour ago, and i really want to lose my virginity, so i ask her to have sex "no no i cant, its not right" she said, but i told her "dont worry, i know what im doing, ill be done in like 10 seconds, plus ill give you 2 n64 games if you say yes." So then I gave her Diddy Kong Racing and Ken Griffy Jr. Baseball and we went up to my room. she is a bit confused and scared. then i think to myself- yo i need lube, right? cuz i heard other people saying you need to lube up her clit otherwise it wont fit in properly. ok so i have no lube, but i really want to lose my virginity, so i grab some butter from the fridge, but its cold and it wont melt, so i microwaved it for 8 minutes and i put it in a glass and poured it on her cooter, and now shes saying i burned it. i dont know what to do, my parents are going to be back any minute and shes crying in the bathroom plz help you guys are really smart please help me. any idea how to shut her up? should i give her another n64 game?
What if it's all wrong, and there's no way we can find out? What if science is actually just "a likely story" that is "correct enough" for what we need to do (in terms of engineering) and cannot, in and of itself, tell us what the universe is? One might come up with reasons / excuses, but if the math is broken, and there is no practicable test, leading to - basically "we're done here" - then would we be entering a new historical era of "after science"?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If they keep having disagreements they are going to have to sort it with a mediator. Like maybe a neutral Z boson.
FTFS: "and for all practical purposes, the Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model of Physics is dead."
Was it ever alive for any practical purposes?
Has Netcraft confirmed that the model is dead?
The BBC article is a piece of shoddy journalism. The LHC has moved the minimal energy at which new physics may occur to higher levels. However, it has done so not only with supersymmetry but with all other possible theories of new physics, see http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/08/supersymmetry-and-irrationality-of-bbc.html Supersymmetry remains the most viable candidate for new physics to be found. Only the constrained versions of the MSSM, the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, have been ruled out for a priori sensible values of the parameters. But it's not even true that the whole MSSM has been eliminated. Many other non-SUSY models of new physics have been moved by the data to much higher energies than SUSY - which includes Kaluza-Klein and Randall-Sundrum gravitons, small black holes, leptoquarks, preons, and many others. It's just a flawed interpretation that the data so far present a case to switch from SUSY to something else. If something, they indicate that *no* new theory is needed to describe doable experiments.
Supersymmetry was not proposed to provide a possible dark matter particle. Supersymmetry grew out of attempts to reduce the needed parameters of the standard model, e.g. to explain the weak scale. It was only later that it was noticed that the lightest supersymmetric particles could make ideal dark matter particles. Furthermore, current LHC results most certainly do NOT rule out supersymmetry. The measurements have just reduced the allowed phase space for certain realizations of the theory.
Finally, experimentalists never have the last word on whether a theory is truly dead or not. Theorist have shown time and time again that they are capable of coming up with novel ways of saving a theory. Only when the theory requires something which is then falsified does a theory die (or it becomes too complex relative to other theories). That has not happened. Even the BBC article includes lots of hedging.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/08/supersymmetry-and-irrationality-of-bbc.html
The BBC has placed supersymmetry next to the carbon dioxide and the AGW "deniers" as the ultimate enemies of Gaia. A would-be journalist, Mr Pallab Ghosh, chose this title:
LHC results put supersymmetry theory 'on the spot'
The reality is that after 2/fb or so (pronounce: "two inverse femtobarns") that have been analyzed by each major detector of the LHC, no sign of new physics has been detected. It's still a beginning of the experiment and the total number of collisions inside the LHC will grow by orders of magnitude and the energy will be doubled, too. Each year of operation will have a comparable to chance to find something new as the first year. Or just a little bit smaller.
It's because the total amount of energy deposited in the final products of the LHC inelastic collisions is growing more or less exponentially and new physics has a pretty much uniform chance to emerge at the logarithmic energy scale.
It's the beginning but the LHC has already falsified many particular models with new phenomena predicted below 1 TeV or so - or, more precisely, with new phenomena visible in the first two inverse femtobarns. There have been lots of papers talking about possible observations in this region because many people liked things "behind the corner" that could have been a recipe for a quick journey to fame. It didn't work. ;-)
The experiments have surely not "punished" supersymmetry more than any other bottom-up theory even though many ignorant and deluded laymen such as Mr Ghosh are self-evidently obsessed with this utter misconception...
The original link in the Pallab Ghosh article (removed at edit time) was for this story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570
"Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics."
This is from the article you linked to:
"Eminent SUSY phenomenologists Gordon Kane told the following to the SUSY-hating Marxist blogger Tommaso Dorigo:"
" it's just a flawed idea to ask experimenters - such as the CMS boss Mr Jordan Nash - about "our understanding". He doesn't seem to have too deep an understanding of the parameter spaces of supersymmetric theories. This is not a surprising criticism; he is an experimenter, after all. . . . Mr Ghosh shouldn't have asked experimenters about theoretical questions."
"Maybe Nature abhors the huge percentage of leftists in the current Academia so She won't give them any new and important secrets to be discovered - and She will give the last secrets to the last conservative white males on the periphery of the institutionalized science only. "
"most typical SUSY opponents are old and grumpy hippie assholes "
"Mr Ghosh should splash himself down the drain because his work is a pile of garbage."
A physicist who can actually explain it in English
... but when I do, I head over to http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ (Not Even Wrong).
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
The irrational numbers are usually rigorously defined by partitioning the rational numbers using Dedekind cuts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedekind_cut).
Because today science found that something IS NOT - and that can be removed from the list of things to try to find WHAT IS. The very basic nature of science; test;observe;conclude.
As opposed to religion which starts at conclude and then everything else has to fit that.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
To build a steel suspension bridge is what existing mathematical models are to the more subtle, esoteric minutia of standard model theories! The physical sciences need a different modeling language to visualize, extrapolate, interpret and explore these regions where it appears that mysteries still abound.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
There are a few supersymmetry models, many pop up in string theory. No rethinking of mainstream theories necessary from these results.
The Higgs is part of the standard model, while various supersymmetry models exist. This is not a blow to any mainstream model
I recall when supersymmetry was all the rage, to the point where axial jets in Fermilab were considered evidence that the only way forward was susy. The beauty of its solution to the hierarchy problem demanded attention, and lacking any other contenders there was a significant level of "well, this has to be it!". Then by the late 80's, the lack of any evidence for susy partners right in the middle of the rich bands made it sort of fade into the background. By then superstrings were all the rage.
So here we are another 20 years later and superstrings (sorry, "m-theory") is apparently in the same process of dying a slow death. And then along comes LHC. Now no one really knows what it's going to find, if anything, except for the desperate hope it will find the Higgs so they can hand out some more Nobel's. But with m-theory silent (or more accurately, screaming too loudly), and huge holes in the energy levels between the top and LHC, suddenly supersymmetry re-appears. Not because there's any reason to believe it mind you, it's just that there's nothing else in the energy hole that LHC can hit that we could actually test.
http://xkcd.com/435/
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
How a system works can't be told from the inside of the same system.
Oh, and how is that? I'd imagine it would be something along these lines: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
Now it is true that you can never prove axioms (nor prove a negative), and thus never prove a model to be true from within the same system. But I see no reason why the true rules of the system could not be accurately described. They just can't be proven.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Quick, there's doubt by some in the science community about Supersymmetry! Let's get a whole bunch of us together and write articles and blogs about how the whole idea of Supersymmetry is crap! Maybe we can come up with some reasons of our own too!
Hmm, why won't the mums, dads and business people join me this time??
There's doubt!!!
http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/08/19/current-lhc-data-and-supersymmetry-is-supersymmetry-in-trouble/
Sorry to call you on this, but the rule is too much fun not to post. So thanks for the excuse:
For the better understanding of the underlying simplicity of English spelling:
"I before E
except after C
or when sounded like A as in NEIGHBOR and WEIGH
and in weird words like WEIRD"
Wikipedia has a discussion of I/E ordering in English, but it lacks this particular mnemonic.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion, at other times, italicism.
See Hugh Everett III http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III
Why should there be a beginning and end to reality? Infinity makes much more sense.