The uncertain future of particle physics

nytimes.com

2 pointsComputerGuru2 comments

A collection of responses can be found at https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10768

I agree along the lines of Peter's comment: "These hard-won null results are not a failure of the experimental program, but a great success of it. The only failure here is that of the theorists who came up with bad theory and ran a hugely successful hype campaign for it. I don’t see how the lesson from seeing an experimental program successfully shoot down bad theory is that we should stop funding further such experiments. I also don’t see how finding out that theorists were wrong in their predictions of new phenomena at the few hundred GeV scale means that new predictions by (often the same) theorists of no new phenomena at the multiple TeV scale should be used as a reason not to fund experimentalists who want to see if this is true."

Nobody sane is predicting "no new phenomena at the multiple TeV scale". The correct statement is "no credible predictions of new phenomena at the multiple TeV scale". Not so much because such predictions come from "(often the same) theorists", but because the available data really doesn't offer much of a clue as to what might lie beyond the LHC's reach.

There may be new phenomena at the multiple TeV scale, but it is also quite possible that there is nothing there, and nothing all the way up to the Planck scale. Without even naturalness to lean on, the only guiding principle left is "pay and pray".

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