Far out cosmology: Is beauty truth and truth beauty? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 11, 2016, 01:43 (3086 days ago) @ David Turell

This is at the nub of string theory persisting despite no evidence and the quest for supersymmetry lasting for more than 40years with no smidgen of any proof:-http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/beauty-in-physics/-"Physicists often describe their earliest experiences with the field as borderline spiritual, moments in which they realized that they—they!—can represent the world with math. They can describe how stars shrink to black holes, how hard you will hit your head if you slip on a banana peel, and how protons fall apart inside particle accelerators. That ability gives them a sense of control in the way that describing something gives humans dominion over it.-"For many physicists, this fosters a desire to get to the very, very bottom of things: the theory of everything. Such a theory, many physicists often believe, should be beautiful, simple, elegant, aesthetically pleasing. All of the forces should fit under one umbrella; all particles need to emerge from a nested set of equations. No ifs, ands, buts, or loopholes.-***-"The current gold standard for describing the nature of reality, the Standard Model, isn't physicists' ideal because, among other blemishes, it isn't perfectly symmetric, and the way it glues fundamental forces together is a little kludgy. That's partially why scientists have developed a new idea, called supersymmetry, which smooths and extends the Standard Model, giving each of those old-school particles a new-school “supersymmetric” counterpart.-"Despite the fact that particle physicists have found no evidence of supersymmetry, they continue hunting for the elusive supersymmetric partners—partly because the theory is more aesthetically appealing than the Standard Model.-"But not all physicists believe that beauty should count as indirect evidence in favor of an idea.-***-"Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics at Dartmouth College, began his career searching for the underlying explanations of why the universe is the way it is. But about a decade ago, he felt uncertainty tugging at him. “You look outside, and what you see in nature is not really perfection and symmetry,” he says. “You see patterns and formats which are not exactly perfect. Animal, tree, cloud, face: They obviously have symmetry but not perfect symmetry. It's not really perfection, but near perfection.”-***-"He saw the blemishes in physics, too. There is more matter than antimatter, for example. If the two were perfectly balanced and symmetric, they would have annihilated each other and the universe would be empty—there'd be no physicists to wonder why, or to high-five each other after the discovery of a beautiful but deadly cosmic balance. “Something happened during the history of the early universe to cause this,” he says. “That got me thinking that perhaps the insistence that we have in search of perfect symmetry is not a physics idea, but a bias.”-***-"But some physicists may be reluctant to give up their beautiful theories, even if the data dictates they should. For example, while the Large Hadron Collider has so far failed to show evidence of supersymmetry, many have essentially said that the collision wasn't powerful enough or that some small modifications are all that's needed to fit the theory they love with the data they gathered.-“'Supersymmetry has been around since 1974, for 42 years, and it doesn't really have any evidence that it's there. But people really bet their careers on this,” Gleiser explains. “Many physicists have spent 40 years working on this, which is basically their whole professional life.”-"That may change in in ten years or so, he says, when further advances to the LHC could force the hangers-on to let go if the data they need doesn't materialize. “If we don't find evidence, people who still stick to it after that are doing it as a philosophical practice,” he says.-"Of course, it's certainly possible that the answers to life, the universe, and everything will be elegant. To physicists like Demers and Gleiser, that's not the problem: The problem is the a priori assumption that it is so. And if the foundational principles of the universe turn out to be ugly or tedious, perhaps we can find the beauty beneath the mess."-Comment: we have presented existing scientists who claim beauty alone is enough. that is religion! If it can't be measured it doesn't exist.