Higgs Data Offers Joy and Pain For Particle Physicists 186
scibri writes "So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson, what's next? Well: 'There's going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,' predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. The data has shored up the standard model, but technicolor is dead and supersymmetry is starting to look pretty ropey now. Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks in the standard theory in the hopes of being the first to find a deeper truth about how the Universe works."
You can't kill SUSY (Score:5, Interesting)
Every new discovery of the past few decades has supposedly "killed" SUSY, but every time it makes a comeback with a modification to avert whatever problem the observation caused. Other theories do the same, to a slightly lesser extent.
I don't see why Technicolor is dead. The Nature article makes the claim that it's because Technicolor is Higgsless, but that's something of a falsehood. Technicolor lacks an elementary Higgs, because the role played by the elementary Higgs in the Standard Model is instead played by a composite particle. As far as I can tell it's perfectly possible that the bosonic state at 125GeV is a composite rather than elementary Higgs.
(FD: I'm a PhD student with a thesis area based around technicolor)
Re:brilliant, clap, clap (Score:5, Interesting)
Higgs discovery is the nail in the coffin of ST (Score:1, Interesting)
String Theory has failed to even generate a single definitive prediction after 44 years of hype.
ST is gonna go down in history as one of the biggest wastes of money and human potential ever.
It's equivalent to religion since nothing in ST is (currently?) falsifiable and you have to believe in it to work on it.
Re:brilliant, clap, clap (Score:5, Interesting)
> There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
Actually there is. Unfortunately it requires death as that results of that experience and the aftermath will provide all the proofs and more then one person could ever dream that indeed your consciousness simply changes state after death, and that there is a super-consciousness to the sub-consciousness of everyone. *Unfortunately* getting the results of said experiment back to the living is the catch. The other "kink" is that: Besides if you already knew the answer, it would (mostly) invalidate the purpose of being human in the first place.
The other way would be to learn meditation and learn how to interact with your True Self. Again, unfortunately one could spend an entire lifetime before ones "get confirmation" that there is indeed far, far more to "who you truely are."
The point though, either way the answer is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. There are indeed many good people of all kinds of beliefs, faiths, and lack of said beliefs and faiths. If one has to rely on an external force / rules to be positive internally methinks one is the missing the *whole* point of religion which is little more then spiritual kindergarten. At some point one doesn't need others telling you to internalize how to treat others with respect, kindness, etc.
The ignorance and arrogance of man is to simply assume that some questions are unknowable. They may not be easy to get, but they are indeed there if one dedicates their life to seeking them. Again, the proof of this, sadly, is also going thru the death experience.
It is simpler to "just get on with life" - learning and loving. That's what its all about at the end of the day -- creating positive relationships with everyone else.
The instant someone is trying to "sell you" a philosophy is the instant it would be good to be skeptical of their agenda.
Re:I for one welcome the death of String Theory (Score:4, Interesting)
String theory has many, many variations. Falsifying them means first narrowing down which variations just might have some correspondance to physical reality, then finding ways to test those further. All the ones that we could call interesting (because they might fit 'objective reality for this universe'). involve very high energies, so we can't build an accelerator nearly powerful to test them by that particular method. That's not the same as being untestable - for example, a particular string model might make predictions about something else, like Proton decay, that we can test. Some versions imply things about cosmolgy that we can test by astronomical observation.
The point is, that we probably won't test all the variants much or at all. Sometimes, a physicist may decide to toss out a bunch of variants because the equations look needlessly complex or full of fudge factors - scientists often look for certain types of style or form in fundamental equations, as when Einstein decided to not add the complexity of a Cosmological constant to General Relativity. It's not the same as doing a scientific test for falsifiability to just decide not to look at the more complex equations at all and hope you will either find something going through the more beautiful and elegant versions, or shoot them all down, and then some grad student can try some of the more complicated variants.
Re:brilliant, clap, clap (Score:4, Interesting)
It is essential to science that experimental results are public and repeatable. What you are talking about doesn't fit into those categories. Perhaps you could call it knowledge, but it isn't knowledge in the ordinary sense.
If I had a dream where I met Satan and he told me his favorite shampoo, you could call that knowledge, but it isn't knowledge in the scientific sense, or even common sense.
Re:Is mass loss in nuclear fusion just Higgs drag? (Score:5, Interesting)
The three valence quarks inside a proton for instance have a rest mass of only 11 MeV/c^2, which they get by means of the Higgs mechanism. The rest of the 938 MeV/c^2 that is the full rest mass of the proton is its quantum chromodynamic binding energy, that is the energies of the gluons that are keeping the three quarks together, so the Higgs mechanism accounts for only 1% of the mass of a composite particle like a proton. Not all mass is drag in the Higgs field. It is by no means the final word on the origin of all mass. If the Higgs mechanism was the only way particles could acquire their masses, then the neutrino should have zero mass, and well, it doesn't [wikipedia.org].