New Science Stories: Ripping Away At the Multiverse, Supersymmetry and Higgs Boson as the God Particle.

The big news two years ago was the "discovery' of the Higgs Boson, aka the God Particle, so called because it supposedly gives mass to all other particles, in a sense "creating" them. That's so 2012. Now the particle physicists, still trying to earn their meals, have devised an attack on both the Higgs Boson and the Multiverse Theory.

Called the "scale-symmetric theory of nature", the new theory makes a basic assumption for no apparent reason: all particles start off with neither mass nor length. This eliminates a lot of stuff from the equations, of course, and allows all sorts of rampant speculation. For one thing it strips mass from Higgs, right off the bat (and thus the appellation of God Particle).

Nature, at the deepest level, may not differentiate between scales. With scale symmetry, physicists start with a basic equation that sets forth a massless collection of particles, each a unique confluence of characteristics such as whether it is matter or antimatter and has positive or negative electric charge. As these particles attract and repel one another and the effects of their interactions cascade like dominoes through the calculations, scale symmetry “breaks,” and masses and lengths spontaneously arise.

So mass occurs spontaneously when there are so many massless particles of type A and type B that somehow the balance between type A and type B is lost, and the imbalance "creates" mass. That imbalance is called "symmetry breaking". So once again we have something coming from nothing, er... sort of.

"When the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Laboratory in Geneva closed down for upgrades in early 2013, its collisions had failed to yield any of dozens of particles that many theorists had included in their equations for more than 30 years. The grand flop suggests that researchers may have taken a wrong turn decades ago in their understanding of how to calculate the masses of particles.

” Meanwhile, supersymmetry used standard mathematical techniques, and dealt with the hierarchy between the Standard Model and the Planck scale directly. Supersymmetry posits the existence of a missing twin particle for every particle found in nature. If for each particle the Higgs boson encounters (such as an electron) it also meets that particle’s slightly heavier twin (the hypothetical “selectron”), the combined effects would nearly cancel out, preventing the Higgs mass from ballooning toward the highest scales. Like the physical equivalent of x + (–x) ≈ 0, supersymmetry would protect the small but non-zero mass of the Higgs boson. The theory seemed like the perfect missing ingredient to explain the masses of the Standard Model — so perfect that without it, some theorists say the universe simply doesn’t make sense.

Yet decades after their prediction, none of the supersymmetric particles have been found. “That’s what the Large Hadron Collider has been looking for, but it hasn’t seen anything,” said Savas Dimopoulos, a professor of particle physics at Stanford University who helped develop the supersymmetry hypothesis in the early 1980s. “Somehow, the Higgs is not protected.

Some even question that the entire enterprise of breaking things, sorting through all the trash to see if one of the pieces fits the prediction, and claiming success if one time out of many there is one shard that fits, sort of, is a valid pursuit at all. It does, however, create employment.

“We’re not in a position where we can afford to be particularly arrogant about our understanding of what the laws of nature must look like,” said Michael Dine, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been following the new work on scale symmetry. “Things that I might have been skeptical about before, I’m willing to entertain.”"

Scale Symmetry has been ignored since it was first proposed in 1995 by William Bardeen. Instead, the sexier "Supersymmetry" was pursued full throttle, in part because it proposed buckets full of new particles to be verified in high energy accelerators. What fun... except that none of those particles have shown up in the 30 years of bashing particles into each other. This is known as the grand flop.

So now the entire enterprise is being stood on its head, with creation now occurring from massless, dimensionless non-things having their population going out of balance. Is this converging on strings? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

How does the multiverse fit into this? With the perfection of the previous model being so unlikely, it was thought that there must be many other universes which have models which are more likely. But now that is out, also, if scale symmetry is valid.

” As the logical conclusion of prevailing assumptions, the multiverse hypothesis has surged in begrudging popularity in recent years. But the argument feels like a cop-out to many, or at least a huge letdown. A universe shaped by chance cancellations eludes understanding, and the existence of unreachable, alien universes may be impossible to prove. “And it’s pretty unsatisfactory to use the multiverse hypothesis to explain only things we don’t understand,” said Graham Ross, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford.”

But the scale symmetry approach means that gravity might not affect the Higgs boson: therefore “agravity” has to be invented. And agravity creates “ghosts”.

” A theory called “agravity” (for “adimensional gravity”) developed by Salvio and Strumia may be the most concrete realization of the scale symmetry idea thus far. Agravity weaves the laws of physics at all scales into a single, cohesive picture in which the Higgs mass and the Planck mass both arise through separate dynamical effects. As detailed in June in the Journal of High-Energy Physics, agravity also offers an explanation for why the universe inflated into existence in the first place. According to the theory, scale-symmetry breaking would have caused an exponential expansion in the size of space-time during the Big Bang.

However, the theory has what most experts consider a serious flaw: It requires the existence of strange particle-like entities called “ghosts.” Ghosts either have negative energies or negative probabilities of existing — both of which wreak havoc on the equations of the quantum world.

“Negative probabilities rule out the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, so that’s a dreadful option,” said Kelly Stelle, a theoretical particle physicist at Imperial College, London, who first showed in 1977 that certain gravity theories give rise to ghosts. Such theories can only work, Stelle said, if the ghosts somehow decouple from the other particles and keep to themselves. “Many attempts have been made along these lines; it’s not a dead subject, just rather technical and without much joy,” he said.”

Let’s see. Agravity; ghost particles; negative probabilities; particles with neither mass nor dimension; creation of mass out of nothing; that’s a hard sell.

” In the meantime, there’s a sense of rekindling hope.
“Maybe our mathematics is wrong,” Dine said. “If the alternative is the multiverse landscape, that is a pretty drastic step, so, sure — let’s see what else might be.”

Well, it IS something for the guys to do.