Bankrupting Physics

Unzicker

I am not old enough to remember all the deaths the theory of supersymmetry (SUSY) has died in the history of accelerator experiments. Supersymmetry attempts to give a unified mathematical description of elementary particles by postulating a collection of mirror particles. The hypothetical twins are distinguished from the known ones by their superheavy masses, and for that reason, remain undetected so far in all particle colliders. The first big gravestone was the DESY lab in Hamburg in 1978, where supersymmetry grossly failed to predict the experimental outcome. But a really agonizing year must have been 2012, when Scientific American published an article in their May issue asking “Is Supersymmetry Dead?” and not the slightest trace of supersymmetry could be found in the long-sought-after Large Hadron Collider data at CERN.

Peter Woit commented in his blog Not Even Wrong, “The paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)evidence, threatening to take down the life’s work of hundreds if not thousands of theorists.” However, the really die-hard adherents argue that “not the whole parameter space” has been checked yet, comparing the search for supersymmetry to a game in which your friend assures you that a pea is hidden under one of the five cups put upside down on a table. You have turned over four cups. Now do you still trust that the pea will show up under the fifth? Of course...

The reason behind the supersymmetry hype is the ugly complication of the standard model. With its arbitrary concepts, it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, and this is an inspiration to look out for a more uniform, more beautiful theory, just like bleak industrial suburbs foster a desire for palm-decorated paradises.

The standard models of cosmology and particle physics are ailing, but theoretical physics overall is in a much worse shape. There has been no real output at all in the past decades. Strings, inflation, and multiverses have formed gigantic bubbles of speculation that can barely hide their ridiculously empty content. It is likely that theorists will aggressively defend their bogus fantasies for some time yet. But the higher-dimensional rigmarole will eventually be identified by the public and deflated. When the fantasies end in smoke, physics will be left without any credible theory. It will have lost its credibility...