Rethinking Your Assumptions to Solve the Hierarchy Problem

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The absence of new particles at the electroweak scale is really concerning to the future of particle physics. I think that in my mind, it's absolutely worth building a bigger, more energetic particle accelerator to look beyond what the LHC is able to see. But in good conscience, I can't promise you will see anything. Anything new will rediscover the standard model, of course. If we do find something, but I'm not the one writing the checks, right? So I have to be honest about what the expectations are. I think this is a truly difficult problem.

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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