We discovered the elusive Higgs boson last year , but it was n’t exactly what we expected . accord to some physicist , that means the macrocosm itself is n’t quite what we thought either .
Over on the Simons Foundation website , Natalie Wolchover has a great introduction to this bizarre idea :
On an overcast good afternoon in late April , physics professors and students crowded into a wood - paneled lecture mansion at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani - Hamed , a gamey - visibility theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton , N.J. With his saturnine , shoulder joint - length fuzz shoved behind his ears , Arkani - Hamed laid out the dual , seemingly self-contradictory implications of late experimental upshot at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe .
“ The universe is inevitable , ” he declared . “ The universe is impossible . ”
The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50 - class - old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass , which enable them to form crowing construction such as beetleweed and humans . “ The fact that it was seen more or less where we carry to find it is a triumph for experiment , it ’s a victory for hypothesis , and it ’s an meter reading that cathartic works , ” Arkani - Hamed told the crowd .
However , in order for the Higgs boson to make sense with the sight ( or tantamount energy ) it was determined to have , the LHC needed to encounter a drove of other particles , too . None turned up .
With the discovery of only one particle , the LHC experimentation deepened a profound problem in physics that had been brewing for decades . advanced equality seem to capture reality with breathless truth , correctly prognosticate the values of many constants of nature and the existence of particles like the Higgs . Yet a few constants — including the mass of the Higgs boson — are exponentially unlike from what these trusted police indicate they should be , in direction that would rule out any chance of aliveness , unless the cosmos is shaped by incomprehensible mulct - tunings and cancellation .
In risk is the whim of “ ingenuousness , ” Albert Einstein ’s ambition that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful , inevitable and ego - contained . Without it , physicists face the harsh prospect that those law are just an arbitrary , mussy consequence of random wavering in the fabric of space and time .
How can the world be unnatural ? Find out by reading the quietus of this essayover at the Simons Foundation .
Higgs bosonPhysicsScience
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