{"id":6392,"date":"2013-10-22T20:08:13","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T00:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6392"},"modified":"2013-11-06T17:26:41","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T22:26:41","slug":"its-too-soon-to-declare-supersymmetry-a-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6392","title":{"rendered":"It’s too soon to declare supersymmetry a tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, maybe one more before I leave…<\/p>\n

Tom Siegfried, last heard from telling us that Belief in multiverse requires exceptional vision<\/a>, now has two new pieces at Science News (here<\/a> and here<\/a>) arguing that the failure of the LHC to see SUSY is not really a big problem for SUSY proponents. You see, it’s only a problem if you believe physics theories should be simple and if you believe in naturalness. According to Siegfried, what the LHC is telling us is that you just have to give up on one of these, with your choices now:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Give up on simplicity. Just announce that SUSY is fine and solves the naturalness problem, but we’re not seeing it because it’s not the MSSM (which adds more than a hundred parameters), but something really, really complicated, so complicated that it manages to show up in such a way that the LHC experiments can’t see any evidence of it. Believe this, and you can still believe in SUSY, no need to face the tragedy of an idea you’ve done so much to promote getting killed by heartless experimentalists.<\/li>\n
  2. Give up on naturalness and have the exceptional vision to believe in the multiverse. Then you can fine-tune your SUSY particles up to very high energies and make them unobservable. Again, you’re free to keep believing in SUSY, writing articles and books about it, etc., despite the negative experimental results. The advantage of this option is that you don’t need to make your SUSY complicated, it can just be the MSSM, so you keep simplicity. Of course, once you accept fine-tuning, you could get a whole lot more simplicity really easily: just throw out SUSY and stick to the SM….<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, maybe one more before I leave… Tom Siegfried, last heard from telling us that Belief in multiverse requires exceptional vision, now has two new pieces at Science News (here and here) arguing that the failure of the LHC to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6392"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6396,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions\/6396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}