![]() The book answers the question of "have we let wishful thinking about what secrets nature holds cloud our judgment?" with a resounding "yes!"Īn asymmetry between the bosons and anti-bosons common to grand unified theories like SU(5). You can feel her frustration, and also the desperation of many of the people she speaks with. In her new book, Lost In Math, Sabine Hossenfelder adroitly confronts this crisis head on, interviewing mainstream scientists, Nobel Laureates, and (non-crackpot) contrarians alike. These blind alleys, which have borne no fruit for literally two generations of physicists, continue to attract funding and attention, despite possibly being disconnected from reality completely. Yet unlike in the past, these dead-ends continue to represent the fields in which the leading theorists and experimentalists cluster to investigate. In the aftermath of Runs I and II at the LHC, much of the interesting parameter space for SUSY is gone, including the simplest versions that satisfy the 'WIMP Miracle' criteria. particles have been discovered, and just over 50% have never showed a trace that they exist. The Standard Model particles and their supersymmetric counterparts. And the unnaturally low-but-non-zero value of the cosmological constant has led to the predictions of a specific type of multiverse that cannot even be tested. The unnaturalness of the Standard Model has led to new symmetries in the form of Grand Unification and, more recently, String Theory, which (again) have had none of their predictions confirmed. The difference in mass scale between the heaviest particle and the Planck scale (the hierarchy problem) was the motivation for supersymmetry again, it's had zero of its predictions confirmed. The proposed solution (a new symmetry known as the Peccei-Quinn symmetry) has had zero of its new predictions confirmed. There's an unnaturally small amount of CP-violation in the strong decays. Siegel, with images derived from ESA/Planck and the DoE/NASA/ NSF interagency task force on CMB researchīut despite the successes of these naturalness arguments, they don't always bear fruit. This leads, over time, to the large-scale structure in the Universe today, as well as the fluctuations in temperature observed in the CMB. inflation ends, they become density fluctuations. ![]() The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation get stretched across the Universe, and when. In its simplest form, it states that there ought to be some sort of physical explanation for why components of the Universe with very different properties ought to have those differences between them. This type of thinking is known as a fine-tuning or "naturalness" argument. If you weren't aware of any underlying reason why these masses should be so different, you'd assume there was some reason for it. The neutrinos are at least four million times lighter than the electron, while the Planck mass - the so-called "natural" energy scale for the Universe - is some 10 17 (or 100,000,000,000,000,000) times heavier than the top quark. The electron, the lightest particle that makes up the atoms we find on Earth, is more than 300,000 times less massive than the top quark, the heaviest Standard Model particle. All the way at the other end of the scale, the Planck scale hovers at a foreboding 10^19 GeV. The neutrinos themselves are at least 4 million times lighter than the electron: a bigger difference than exists between all the other particles. the top quark the lightest non-neutrino is the electron. The masses of the quarks and leptons of the standard model. (In the case of the Collisons or Winklevosses, literally!) The distribution of billionaires isn't completely random, you see, and so there might be some underlying reason for these two seemingly unrelated things to actually be related. but it won't be if there's some reason that A and B are very close together. This wouldn't be surprising, and it exposes a truth about large numbers: in general if A is large and B is large, then A - B will also be large. Would you be shocked to learn the Winklevoss twins - Cameron and Tyler, the first Bitcoin billionaires - had identical net worths? Or that the Collison brothers, Patrick and John (co-founders of Stripe), were worth the same amount to within a few hundred dollars? But it might not be all that unlikely after all.Īfter all, you don't know which billionaires were on your list. It might, however, surprise you if the difference between them was only a few thousand dollars, or was zero. The first 'bitcoin billionaires' in the world, their net worths are practically identical, but there's an underlying reason behind why. Entrepreneurs Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss discuss bitcoin with Maria Bartiromo at FOX.
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