The Negative Effects of Supersymmetry on Intuition

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No theory that even really came close to working there. That's a possibility. But the other possibility is that something way more dramatic and profound is going on, right? You know, when you say you have these expectations from effective field theory for the magnitude of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant and they're way wrong,. It could be something deep about the nature of space time or quantum field theory or something like that. I haven't come up with anything very plausible yet. Not even the least publishable unit, which academics like to talk about.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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