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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."
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...
Carver Mead ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead ) has been saying something similar for years....And I came up with a similar view a few years after he published his book on the subject, without having read his book or even previously hearing or thinking of anything about particles not existing; it just came to me...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality#Wave-only_view
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
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.
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."
Except this is the equivalent of having a round-earth hypothesis and finding that ships do not disappear behind the horizon.
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?
About until the very most primitive scientists, until a semi-reasonable scientific explanation was found, and about the same as the other two, respectively. Seriously, one of the very first people to attempt science (the Greeks) knew the Earth was round, most of them knew thunder was a natural phenomenon but couldn't explain it, and they established fire as one of the four elements of nature (again: not magic but we just don't know how it works quite yet.)
However, if an experiment created explicitly for (among other things) confirmation or refutation of Supersymmetry not only doesn't discover it, but discovers absolutely no sign of it and in fact contradicts it (which I believe these results do), then chances are it's time to go back to the drawing board. Or the math board, in this case.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Hmmm. Frankly, the guy sounds like a bit of a loon on the subject, which is a very common problem when brilliant, accomplished people in one field who are used to being "the smartest guy in the room" try to tackle problems in a related field which lies just outside the area of their expertise. (I'm looking at you, Slashdot.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No no no! You go where the evidence takes you, no matter how much you liked the hypothesis.
Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to an error of less than 2%.
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.
It's one thing to fail because of religious, cultural, or whatever dogma hindering knowledge acquisition. It's a completely different thing when most professional, career scientists at the top of their field, pursuing the unknown while trying to remain as unbiased as possible, are calling it quits. the latter means that while there might be value in more experiments, that value is not enough to justify the cost, i.e. they'll revisit the idea if new evidence shows up in other experiments to warrant it.
To put it another way, the most important test have been conducted, and the results are not favorable. If the theory still ends up being useful, it would only be useful for a few edge cases. And as such, it may not actually describe anything previously unknown.
That having been said, it's not quite time to write off the Higgs quite yet. There's still a ways to go before the range of energy the Higgs is supposed to show up in is exhausted. You are talking about the Higgs when you say particle, right?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Please don't confuse the "Everybody thought the world was flat until Colombus!" crowd with facts. Telling them the ancient Greeks knew they were living on a sphere (from the shape of the shadow of the earth on the moon) won't disturb their firmly held articles of faith at all.
It's not quite like that. We know that if this class of theory is correct the particles in question MUST exist and that they will be detectable in the given energy range by a known signature. They aren't there.
So whatever theory is more correct will either not predict these particles or will predict them at an energy we have yet to reach.
They went sailing for the edge of the world so they could hold a mirror over the edge and prove there was a turtle holding it up. Instead, they went all the way around and came back to the starting point, so the flat earth theory must be discarded.
Possibly, but the idea didn't originate with Mead; it's been around long enough that they were considering it in the days of Einstein, even if they rejected it at the time. But there's more than
just Mead, myself, and some old fogies taking this line of thinking seriously...
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/fermilab-building-holometer-determine-if-universe-just-hologram
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
If matter is illusion, please stand with your eyes closed and allow me to walk up behind you with a ball-peen hammer. Matter is axiomatically not illusion because it doesn't react to your perceptions, your perceptions react to it.
Hans-Peter Dürr
Otherwise known as Herr Durr.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
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.
Why all this OR/OR thinking. You are for us OR against us. You are for a flat earth OR a round one. Here in Babel you speak one language OR another. This is such a negative attitude. Why not start having an AND/AND mentality?
You can agree with some things AND dislike other.
You can speak one language AND others.
You can believe the earth is flat AND round. Just like a pizza.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If you want to be strict here, please mind the distinction between XOR and OR :p
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
and they established fire as one of the four elements of nature
you don't get any points for being wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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...
Then you never get any points, because you will pretty much always be wrong; or at least this is the view taken in science. You'd be hard pressed to find any serious scientist who thinks any sort of absolute truth can really be discovered. That makes your point system pointless (if you will forgive the pun).
weinersmith
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."
To be fair, the uneducated accounted for about 95% of the population in the time period that you're discussing. Literacy levels were very low, and the Catholic church was working hard to maintain this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thinking of fire as an element doesn't get you anything, and in fact, leads you in the wrong direction, and thus it's wrong; whereas we may find that our view of elements with certain atomic weights is simplistic but it lets us do useful work and therefore it's right enough.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its not dead, just resting...
(and pining for the fiords )
I'm assuming you know the history of ancient Greek science well, and know for a fact that their view of fire as an "element" had absolutely no practically useful implications; otherwise I'm sure you wouldn't make that statement with such conviction.
Still though, what's your point? Good science is the process of proposing theories and verifying them with evidence. Of course the theories are going to end up being wrong eventually, and very often won't be practically useful. How would you propose evaluating the work of a modern day theoretical physicist? Based on how much people 2000 years from now agree with it? I think you'd find that metric to be rather unenlightening, as the answer almost always would be "not at all". Based on the practical applications of that work? The vast majority of theoretical physicists would be dead by the time you gave them any grade above F, including the good ones.
weinersmith
Except that the educated people of Europe did NOT believe the world was flat.... it was known that the world was round by anyone who was able to study Aristotle and Mathematics.
In the future I am sure people will say something like "and how long did they think the world was only 6000 years old?"
I see what you did there.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
... 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.
I like any theory that could get rid of particle-wave duality, be it this one, or any other. Thanks for the link! As an aside, I've perused Wikipedia (I know, I know) in the past trying to understand a bit of quantum mechanics and, oh boy, I was floored when I reached the section about interpretations of quantum mechanics: there are like 20 or so listed there. O_o
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I like any theory that could get rid of particle-wave duality, be it this one, or any other.
Honestly, why? I've always considered that duality to be a feature. Being able to study phenomena from two (or more?) otherwise unrelated vectors is useful, isn't it? I know physicists always prefer the holy grail of symplicity, but wtf is wrong with having multiple valid paths to explain what's actually happening?
Or, in /. terms, what's wrong with car analogies as long as they're valid?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist. Why I don't like the model? I guess the main reason is that the particle-wave model goes way over my head. Then, I know about the experiments, the hard data and the math, but something that can be understood in such differing ways sounds suspicious to me, like there's something we don't understand yet and had to "patch things up" with the P-W model (which fits quite nicely). I have no proof or data to back up what I've just said. I admit it's just a hunch or wishful thinking or just my inability to grasp the concept. My quantum-mechanical pet peeve.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Don't worry, we're already getting enough laughter out of the moronic sky fairy worship. You can have this one.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist.
Ditto, fwiw.
... but something that can be understood in such differing ways sounds suspicious to me, like there's something we don't understand yet and had to "patch things up" ...
To paraphrase Richard Feynman, "Yeah, it doesn't make any sense, but this is the way this stuff works." Besides, this happens all the time in other fields. Take software: structured vs. object oriented, waterfall method vs. $DOGS_BREAKFAST_OF_TLAS.
My quantum-mechanical pet peeve.
You should save that for the string theorists. :-) That stuff makes quantum mechanics look drop dead believable.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Well, so far it's been less than 400 years. Archbishop Ussher came up with that bit of academic idiocy in 1650....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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
you do realize the many supersymmetric models aren't necessary for the Standard Model? this result proves nothing about anything but that a particular subset of ss is not born out by experiment
My point is that "we" do not think that... a small group of morons who are out of the main stream believe it, and really, you can only count the last 100 years or so since definitive evidence of the age or the earth was not possible until radiometric dating was available.
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.
Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences both give you the same thing. Which one uses is a matter of preference. Dedekind cuts are a slightly more elementary way of doing it (and thus are often pedagogically favored) whereas Cauchy sequences allow a generalization to well behaved metric spaces. Thus for example, if one wants to construct the p-adic numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_numbers then one can't apply Dedekind cuts (because there's no order) but one can apply Cauchy sequences (because there's a metric).
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.
The four states of matter (as we phrase it today) are solid, liquid, gas and plasma, which map directly to the ancient conceptions of earth, water, air and fire. Just because we changed the meaning of "element" doesn't make the ancients wrong.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Yes. Their monopoly on a large body of knowledge was part of the Church's power. They didn't want peasants reading the bible and disputing their interpretation, nor did they want people educated enough to question their doctrine. Several popes and cardinals wrote long essays arguing against mass literacy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So it appears that what they're proposing in that article you linked is that the third dimension (depth) is actually the same as time, and since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, nothing your universe (i.e. the reality you experience during the entirety of your existence no matter what happens to you or where you go) interacts with could correctly represent the totality of that dimension to you due the the limit of the speed of information. Which would in other words mean that the subjective experience of any particular portion of reality has a completely different experience of the "third" dimension. (Which is the "hologram" effect.)
That's very interesting. I actually know someone that is almost finished writing a high-level book about the metaphysics of this sort of physics. The subjectivity of the third dimension combined with a wave-only view of the universe would mean a lot more about the inherent interconnectedness of everything, in the sense that we would all be unique expressions of the same wave of energy rippling across what we describe as space-time.
FanFictionRecs.net
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.
He estimated it based on deduction so it does not really count.