🚀 go-pugleaf

jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) says:

> sawyer@utahep.uta.edu (Lee Sawyer) writes:
>> 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.
 [...some stuff deleted...]

I agree with this sentiment.  Physicists seem to be too willing to follow
the latest fad.  Supersymmetry is a very pretty theory, but in the absence of
supporting evidence, skepticism is warranted.

>> 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.

I disagree with this.  The principle scientific justification (let's ignore
the pork for a while) of the SSC is the search for the Higgs boson.  Low
energy phenomenology (at and below the Z) strongly supports the idea of
spontaneously broken SU(2)*U(1).  This is indirect evidence for a scalar
boson, the Higgs, or its dynamical equivalent.  Without the Higgs, we are
in a similar situation to the old 4-fermion theory of weak interactions;
it works at low energies, but violates unitarity at high energies (about
2 TeV).  This was first shown by Chanowitz, I think.  The energy of the SSC
was specifically chosen to ensure (I know someone will jump on my use of
that word :-) that either the Higgs or the new dynamics will be seen.

Please note that "supersymmetry" does not appear in the previous paragraph.

   [...more stuff deleted...]

> 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.

What, no smiley?  Do you also object to "superheterodyne," "supersonic,"
"supernova," and "superposition?"