The Big Idea of Choice in Theory

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I think it's interesting that you're using, or appealing to two big ideas about theory, choice, about what to be interested in. I'm involved at the moment in a kind of debate with people about whether or not you can extend the super symmetrical results to non-super symmetric cases. So i turned so as mention their questions in the strong indirections that are keeping me up up nights. And some of these are related. There are features of the strong the feature of the strong interaction that it confines corks is a very hard problem for the strong interactions as they actually are. For a super symmetric version of the strong interactions, it's not such a hard problem.

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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