The Electroweak Scale and the Dark Matter

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It's very natural to assume that there are weakly interacting mass of particles out there. You don't need to have particles that qualify as WIMPs, especially because these particles should be stable and not interact with photons. New particles at the electric week scale might help you with both the dark matter problem and the hierarchy problem. So we have launched programs to look for these particles. It's not like we're planning in the future; it is going on right now.

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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