Natural Physics

Energy is transformed into mass, the kinetic energy of colliding particles giving rise to new particles. This is effectively what is happening at the LHC.

.. the LHC was also designed to reveal new physics. The LHC remains in operation, and, in the wake of the Higgs discovery, expectations remain high for the detection of unknown and unexpected phenomena.

.. Another avenue of inquiry is the search for additional dimensions. The idea that the world could be composed of more spatial dimensions than the three we experience is not new. It was first explored in an unsuccessful attempt to unify James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.4 The advent of string theory, which predicted the existence of at least nine dimensions, led to renewed interest in the idea.

.. From a pragmatic standpoint, supersymmetry has an immense advantage: it explains the mass of the Higgs boson. In the absence of supersymmetry, the mass of this boson should be immense.

.. String theory and supersymmetry, now and forever, one and conceptually inseparable.

.. Supersymmetry offers precise predictions for the existence of heavy, stable, and weakly interacting particles; it is the most widely accepted view regarding the composition of dark matter.

..  “Your ideas are beautiful, coherent, and attractive, but they are also wrong.”

.. The standard model was created in the 1970s and some physicists have never had the experience of confronting their work directly with new data.

  1. The first option is to assume that there exists an as-yet-undiscovered natural mechanism that can explain the values of the fundamental constants.
  2. Good luck is the second option. Among all the possible laws, we have come across the nearly unique solution leading to a complex universe. This is a less than convincing argument.
  3. The third option is a universe in which the fundamental constants are reinterpreted as environmental parameters. Just as our local environment is not representative of the observable universe as a whole, the laws of nature, or the fundamental constants, might not be representative of the universe beyond what we can observe. As complex organisms, we find ourselves, naturally enough, in a specific zone where things just work out.

.. Alan Guth and Andrei Linde’s theory of cosmological inflation is today widely accepted, and generically predicts the emergence of bubble universes. If these bubble universes contain any dynamic fields at all, then they may well contain different effective laws.

This multiverse has been predicted by some of the theories commonly used in cosmology.

.. The multiverse is predicted by the simplest of our theories. In order to make it disappear, it is necessary to repair to theories that are far more complicated. Should we seek simplicity in the theory, or in the world?

.. The existence of the multiverse is a consequence of well-defined and testable theories. If they are testable, they must be falsifiable.