Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Sabine Hossenfelder (and others) On Naturalness

A Power Point presentation (converted to pdf form) on Naturalness from a recent conference presentation by Sabine Hossenfelder explains why Naturalness is not a legitimate hypothesis generator in physics. The straight forward reasoning is solid and she's right. Eventually, the rest of the discipline should come around, although they've wasted a generation ignoring this common sense.

Another presenter (Fred Jegelehner) at the same conference explains how, from other perspectives than the conventional one, there is nothing unnatural about the Higgs boson mass and the conventional "hierarchy problem" is misguided.

Meanwhile Jester comes out of a long hibernation at his blog to say this:
The clear message from the LHC is that the dominant paradigms about the physics at the weak scale were completely misguided. The Standard Model seems to be a perfect effective theory at least up to a few TeV, and there is no indication at what energy scale new particles have to show up. . . . The naturalness problem of the cosmological constant and of the Higgs mass may suggest some fundamental misunderstanding of quantum field theory on our part.
He offers sensible suggestions about new directions that experimenters and theorists in physics should consider as a result - something many of us have been preaching as voices in the wilderness for some time now. 

He cites Sabine's blog, a pre-print on the "Post-Naturalness" era, and an article at the Economist citing people including Woit (of "Not Even Wrong" fame).

1 comment:

neo said...

do you know if Moriond 2018 EW presented any new physics results from LHC or new stricter bounds on gluinos squarks SUSY?

it just finished but i've seen no news articles or blog articles