We've just been watching "Particle Fever" - a documentary about the LHC (from 2007 to the discovery of the Higgs boson last year). In it, at least a couple of people (Monica Dunbar and David Kaplan, IIRC) say that a 115GeV Higgs would be a clear sign of Supersymmetry, while a 140GeV (or greater) would indicate a Multiverse (meaning a String Landscape, I assume). The measured value is 126GeV, which apparently leaves everything open for now.
They seem quite certain that there is a dichotony - SUSY vs MV - and that the MV answer would effectively be "the end of physics", I assume because the fundamental physics underlying the string landscape is only accessible at scales/energies far beyond those accessible to any currently conceivable experiment. I can't quite see this, so perhaps someone could elaborate. That is, it seems to me unlikely that there is a theory that is going to say the ratio of electron to proton masses is exactly what it is (1:1836.15267245 or so, I believe) and that this emerges from simple principles. Since the proton is a composite "particle" a better example might be the ratio of the electron to muon masses, which I believe is around 1:206.7682821476077. When the chemical elements were being discovered, it became clear that there were simple principles underlying the apparently complexity. There were what seemed like completely different substances, which turned out to be related by simple numbers, e.g. if you take something like 2 grams of hydrogen and 16 grams of oxygen and mix them you get 18 grams of water. (Or whatever the correct figures are.) The point being that these small integer (or almost-integer, but they couldn't measure them accurately enough to realise that at the time) values indicate something simpler underlying the observed complexity, whereas 1:1836.15267245 or 1:206.7682821476077, it seems to me, don't. And so on for the various other dimensionless ratios that abound in the Standard Model, plus the fact that we see neutrinos with only one handedness, the absence of antimatter and various other apparent symmetry breakings This seems to me to indicate that a multiverse could easily be involved, and that the (ahem) string of apparently random values we observed emerge from something like there being 10^500 ways to knot a piece of string in 11 dimensions. What I don't understand is why this would not *also* allow supersymmetry to exist? Or why would SUSY rule out a multiverse, as the people in the film seemed to think? Or maybe I misunderstood them. Anyone out there with the ability to explain advanced physics to dummies? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
