Is physics in crisis? An article in the May issue of Scientific American by physicists Joseph Lykken, from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, from the California Institute of Technology, lay bare an issue that is keeping a growing number of physicists up at night. Will supersymmetry — the hypothetical symmetry of nature proposed some 40 years ago — be proved out? Or should it be archived to history as just another clever idea that didnt prove true? A lot is at stake: the lifework of many eminent physicists, both theoretical and experimental; our understanding of how matter behaves at high energies; a possible solution to the dark matter problem, the mysterious particles that cloak ours and other galaxies in the universe; a deeply ingrown faith that nature has an underlying simple structure, somehow coded in an overarching super-symmetry; the realist philosophical position that the universe is, in its essence, comprehensible by reason.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 01:19:33 +0000