Is There a Fourth Generation of Particles?

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In a generation, there are two types of corks. There is a charged lepton, like the electron or and a nutrino, and repeats. We probably can't repeat exactly that, but could there be others? And so for examp in string theory, the kinds of things people do, there sort of games that people play. They're not really predictid in a reliable sense,. But often they are. Some of these things have to be well hidden because they disrupt phenomena we know from astrophysics and cosmology. I think actually, you know, f he sketched out a plausible story, it's not, It's not that crazy, but maybe it's not

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet, there are strong indications from theoretical considerations and cosmological data that we need to do better. But the leading contenders, especially supersymmetry, haven’t yet shown up in our experiments, leading some to wonder whether anthropic selection is a better answer. Michael Dine gives us an expert’s survey of the current situation, with pointers to what might come next.

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Michael Dine received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University. He is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his awards are fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Physical Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Sakurai Prize for theoretical particle physics. His new book is This Way to the Universe: A Theoretical Physicist’s Journey to the Edge of Reality.

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