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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...
"Fucking Higgs Boson, why doesn't it work?"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
First of all, Einstein was famous for doing very clever thought experiments. Many of his ideas about special relativity came from thinking about how objects should behave if they tried to chase light. Second, the ideas of supersymmetry in fact come from inspiration of what we see in reality. In particular, supersymmetry has been posited to explain a number of different strange results, most importantly the apparent discrepancy of dark matter (that is, that the universe seem to have a lot of mass that we can't see).
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? :)
We use the real numbers to model things because they do a really good job. One could try to just model a universe where the base field was the rational numbers (that is, ratios of integers) but that would have a lot of problems. For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners. Moreover, for most purposes, calculations that can be done in the reals can be done with limits of rational numbers (in fact one way of rigorously defining the real numbers defines real numbers as special limits of rationals called Cauchy sequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_sequence. I'm not at all sure why you think the difficulty of factoring integers is relevant in this context. For most practical calculations, you very rarely need to factor integers. Moreover, while it is true that quantum computers can in theory factor integers quickly using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm, for all we know it might be possible for standard computers to factor quickly. Moreover, the models we use to talk about quantum computing rely very heavily on the real numbers which you aren't happy with.
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
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.
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.
Thanks for this clear and cogent post. A lot of /.ers who aren't physicists (i.e., the vast majority of us) seem to really enjoy beating up on modern physics for some reason, and one of the most common complaints is "it's all math, there's no connection to reality any more." It's good to see a reminder that (a) a lot of physics has always been math, (b) there's still plenty of experimental work generating interesting real-world observations which the math is necessary to describe, and (c) the math that's used is pretty damn good at describing the way things work.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Hans-Peter Dürr
Otherwise known as Herr Durr.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Has Netcraft confirmed that the model is dead?
Its not dead, just resting...
(and pining for the fiords )
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.
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