🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug4.155021.16943@utagraph.uta.edu> sawyer@utahep.uta.edu (Lee Sawyer) writes:
>In article <1992Aug4.135508.18583@galois.mit.edu>, jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes...
>>Anything that calls itself "super" is likely to be a bunch of baloney.
>>E.g.:  
>> 
>>supersymmetry (in particle physics)
>>superconducting supercollider
>>superstrings
>> 
>> 
>>:)
>
> OK I saw the smiley, but...
>1) Supersymmetry is the most logical extension of the Standard Model
>   that I know of. There seems to be circumstantial support for it,
>   it naturally predicts dark matter, "demystifies" (to use Gordan Kane's
>   term) the Higgs sector, and seems to predict the eventual unification
>   of the EM, weak, and strong coupling constants (the famous Amaldi plot).
>   I am confident that nature will be found to be supersymmetric, given
>   a reasonable collider to perform the search at. 

I'm confident it won't, but of course time will be the judge.  Note that
supersymmetry postulates a complete symmetry between bosons and fermions
despite the fact that there is not a whit of real evidence for this
notion.  Naively, supersymmetry predicts that every boson will have a
fermionic "superpartner" of the same mass (and vice versa).  No example
of this is known.  One must then work at spontaneous symmetry breaking
to explain why all the superpartners of the known particles are
conveniently just a little bit too massive to have been detected!  
This reminds me of Lewis Carroll's famous invention - he devised a way
of painting his whiskers green, and then built a fan so large that they
couldn't be seen. 

>This leads to...
>2) The SSC, whether you feel it is worth the investment or not, [....]

Now if there had been ONE example of a particle whose superpartner had
been seen, it would make some sense to look around to see if more had
them.  But it's rather odd to buy a billion-dollar device to confirm a
theory that presently has NO experimental evidence supporting it.  Of
course it's possible that this approach will work - but it's not good
science.  When Gell-Mann (sp?) created the eightfold way, for example, he was
reasoning on the basis of existing data, not claiming that there was an
SU(3) symmetry that conveniently had been broken in such a way that not
a trace of it could be observed.  It's true that supersymmetry is
mathematically beautiful.  However, lots of mathematics is beautiful,
and not all of it claims to be important in particle physics.

>3) Superstrings. Here is a new one for this forum : I do not know enough
>   about superstrings to comment on the validity of the theories. Anyone
>   out there with a nonsnide insight on the state of the art in superstring
>   theories ?

Sorry, only snide insights here.  Why must we all be cheerleaders for
the currently fashionable theories, though?

My objections to superstrings in their original formulation is that they
are simply a way of piling up in a heap all the ideas in particle physics that
have not yet made a confirmed prediction -- namely, supersymmetry,
Kaluza-Klein models (extra dimensions rolled up in a little ball, for
the nonexpert), and string theory.  

Some of the mathematical spinoffs of string theory, by the way --
namely, 3-dimensional topological quantum field theories -- show
interesting mathematical relationships with quantum gravity.  I would
not be surprised if large hunks of the math of string theory found their
way into future mathematical physics.  I'm certainly not opposed to
playing around with math in hopes that it winds up describing reality.
What I am opposed to is the pompous glorification of it by prefixes such
as "super", and advertising copy such as the "theory of everything".

Look at it this way.  When Newton wrote on physics, he did not call it
"supermechanics".  He didn't need to because he had real results.