The Hadron Guys Want a Date With SUSY

It occurred to me recently that it's been a while since I checked in with the Large Hadron Collider to see if they've managed to destroy reality.  By an amazing coincidence just as I was thinking this news arrived on things Hadron.

You may have noticed that there has been a distinct lack of black holes being generated, universes demolished and all of the other things we’ve come to expect when people start hitting subatomic particles with the scientific equivalent of really large hammers.  The reason for this is that the Large Hadron Collider up in Switzerland (and France) has been lying dormant for a couple of years. I must admit I didn’t realise it was dormant, I thought it was finished.  The God Particle; found.   We can dismantle the collider and everyone can go home.  Of course I should have known better.  Apparently now that we know everything about the universe it turns out that one of the things we know is that we don't know as much as we thought.  Time to fire up the collider again and see what else we can pound into existence for a fraction of a second.

Actually it seems that the collider has been undergoing repairs after its triumphs of a couple of years ago but now physicists (or more likely minimum wage illegal immigrants hired by physicists) have finished crawling through the tunnels putting sticky tape over the wonky bits and chipping off charred bits of alpine sheep that wandered in for warmth in the Winter months and all is ready to go.  This time the physicists are looking for a girlfriend.  Her name is SUSY.  I’m not even going to pretend I know what SUSY is but apparently proving its existence would be desirable.  If nothing else it would allow us to fit dark matter (at present little more than an excuse for why the sums don’t add up) into our model of the universe.  Our current model of the universe (the Lego version is coming out at Christmas) is elegant and simple (if you're a particle physicist) but it has a couple of glaring holes.  One thing it doesn't explain is dark matter.  Or rather dark matter is the term that physicists came up with to explain the stuff the theory didn't explain.  It's rather like getting three quarters of the way through describing how something works to your child and realising you don't know the rest.  You have to fall back on magic.  Physicists of course can't say something is magic.  So they posited dark matter instead.  Dark matter would really explain a lot (apparently) the only trouble is no one can prove it actually exists.  Time to start pounding the protons.

In all the excitement of discovering the Higgs boson it went overlooked (except by legions of despairing physicists) that the Hadron Collider didn't provide too much support for SUSY.  Various, once hopeful, theories have apparently been tossed overboard.  But SUSY or supersymmetry to give her her full name is just too seductive to abandon simply because she mightn’t exist.  In keeping with the dating website theme SUSY basically involves pairing up bosons and fermions (Never heard of fermions?  Where have you been?).  According to the theory each boson should be linked to a particular fermion and these things should be relatively easy to discover.  The number we've discovered so far is nil.  Which means that there must be a reason (other than that the theory is rubbish) for why we haven't found them.  Enter the Large Hadron Collider, scientists are now hoping it can correct its original refusal to produce results that conform to the theory.  A physicist (or for that matter a high school teacher) could point out at this moment that I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Give me a break, there's only so much physics one can learn from newspaper articles and wikipedia.

Everything that the discovery of the Higgs boson was supposed to achieve might actually be achieved if we can discover SUSY, or not.  Physics isn’t an exact science which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s meant to be.  A more accurate statement would be; physics is an exact science, we just don’t know what we’re doing.  There comes a point when all the obvious stuff has been discovered (rocks, fire, reality television) and then you’ve just got to make stuff up based on your observations, assumptions and best guesswork.  After that you dig a couple of dozen kilometres worth of tunnels in the Alps and start dismantling the universe to see if you’re right.  If you are then Nobel prizes and (based on current experience) a bunch of new intractable questions await.  If you’re wrong, then you look a little silly but at least you can try again always assuming you haven’t accidentally blown up the planet.

So with hope in their hearts and protons in their tunnels the collider boys are pressing the go button in the hopes that their previous success with the Higgs boson wasn't just a flash in the pan.  All new sorts of subatomic particles are waiting to be discovered.  Although I must admit I have a slight problem with the word "discovered".  If you smash a particle into bits and then name the bits are you really discovering something new?  If I drop a plate on the floor I don't call the scientific community excitedly announcing the discovery of twenty seven new pieces of crockery.  I just get a broom.

There is probably more to it than this.  For the sake of a rational universe let's hope so.  In the meantime the guys in Switzerland have come up with a very traditional way to try and get results.  They're going to do exactly the same thing they did last time but with more power.  I wish them well.