Beyond Higgs (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 01, 2012, 18:31 (4376 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: No evidence of supersymmetry so far. May require a new theory:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=supersymmetry-fails-test-forcing-physi...-QUOTE: If nothing new turns up — an outcome casually referred to as the "nightmare scenario" — physicists will be left with the same holes that riddled their picture of the universe three decades ago, before supersymmetry neatly plugged them. And, without an even higher-energy collider to test alternative ideas, Falkowski says, the field will undergo a slow decay: "The number of jobs in particle physics will steadily decrease, and particle physicists will die out naturally."-I believe the process is called Natural Selection.-QUOTE: Greene offers a brighter outlook. "Science is this wonderfully self-correcting enterprise," he said. "Ideas that are wrong get weeded out in time because they are not fruitful or because they are leading us to dead ends. That happens in a wonderfully internal way. People continue to work on what they find fascinating, and science meanders toward truth."-Well, does it? The trouble is, scientists congratulate themselves on discovering the truth, and then they congratulate themselves when they discover that...um...the truth actually wasn't the truth. So with this "wonderfully self-correcting enterprise", how can anyone know at any given moment what IS the truth?-DAVID: Under "Finding Dark Matter" -http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dark-matter-mystery&page=2-QUOTE: "The things we thought were higher probability haven't shown up yet, so we should keep an open mind," said theoretical physicist Lance Dixon of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.-Keep the dark matter hope alive-Despite the difficulty of finding dark matter, whatever it is, physicists say they're not discouraged.
"I'm pretty confident that dark matter is real, and it seems attractive for it to be carried by an elementary particle, although I could think it might not be exactly that way," Dixon said. "We might not be lucky that the elementary particle that is one that is within the realm of detection."-So physicists don't know what dark matter is, they don't know if they can find it, and actually they don't know if it exists, but they kind of hope it does. I wonder how many of them laugh at theists, who have a similar problem.