The Limits of Supersymmetry

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In supersymmetric versions of the standard model, you can't just take the Higgs boson and make a supersymmetric version of it. You need to add more Higgs bosons to your regular non-supersymmetric theory before you supersymmetize it. And so that's an interesting feature of the model that you could test at an accelerator and you could look at it, right? But we haven't found it yet.

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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