What Is It We Don't Understand?

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We don't have to go into, i think, like listing all the particles and forces, but it's important to get on the table. I guess that there is a set of particles and forces that we think is more or less internally complete,. Maybe there's more particles and Forces that we haven't found yet. So so in s esw, so, so i should back up and say that there are a sort of three forces that we deal with commonly in experiments, the strong, the weak and the electro magnetic force. And those forces, we've come from this very tentative understanding forty years ago, say, to a very precise understanding now.

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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