I feel like this was too much a diatribe on why supersymmetry is not a good solution and didn't spend enough time on evaluating what the actual implications are of this result holding.
Nor do I think it is unreasonable to point out that this result, if correct, would not validate supersymmetry (if that is, in fact, the case.)
On the other hand, the fact that supersymmetry isn’t a theory, but a property of a class of models that can be tweaked to fit a broad range of experimental results (again, if that is, in fact, the case) does not rule out the possibility that the LHC could have found evidence that strongly supported one specific theory that happens to be supersymmetric. Hossenfelder seems to be saying that the LHC definitively ruled out what was considered to be the most plausible candidate(s), which would imply there was at least one such falsifiable theory. Allegations of incompetence or mendacity should not be made lightly, and unless the promoters of the LHC routinely said supersymmetry in general might be disproved, the allegations seem unwarranted.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-c...
Quote:
Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money.
The big proclamations came almost exclusively from theoretical physicists; CERN didn’t promise anything they didn’t deliver. That is an important distinction, but I am afraid in the public perception the subtler differences won’t matter. It’s “physicists said.” And what physicists said was wrong. Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow.
What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up.
I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in an energy range of about a TeV (ie accessible at the LHC) “to avoid finetuning.”
I don’t mean to pick on Mangano in particular; his slides are just the first example that Google brought up. This was the argument why the LHC should see something new: To avoid finetuning and to preserve naturalness.
I explained many times previously why the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty. Luckily I no longer have to repeat these warnings, because the data agree that naturalness isn’t a good argument.
> When Kepler found a spinning object theory which worked, it wasn't overfitting.
Well, yeah, that's true, but the important thing about Kepler was not the fact that it was a "spinning object theory", it was the switch from a "circular theory" to an "elliptical theory". (Also the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism, but that was Copernicus, not Kepler).
This is the sort of thing that the supersymmetrists are hoping to achieve, but have not yet achieved, most likely because nature is not supersymmetric in point of actual fact.
So each one propose her/his own pet theory. Supersymmetry? A second Higgs boson? Other ...????
She doesn't like supersymmetry, and rants too much about the people that guess the fix will use supersymmetry.
(I like supersymmetry, but this is not my research area, so she knows much more about this than me about this.)