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Progressive Summary of The Hidden Rules of Physics

Favorite quote: "I doubt my sense of beauty is a reliable guide to uncovering (the) fundamental laws of nature, laws that dictate the behavior of entities that I have no direct sensory awareness of, never had, and never will have. For it to be hardwired in my brain, it ought to have been beneficial during natural selection. But what evolutionary advantage has there ever been to understanding quantum gravity?" - Sabine Hossenfelder

The current problem facing Physics is that there seems to be too much distance between what the experimentalists can do, and what the theorists believe.

Thoughts: I think this is largely because the gray area between the two has shrunk: in order to discover new things, we must know how do to the work of the field we want to discover new things in.

We have a group of theories, that are the front-runners, however, they have failed to predict or confirm anything, and some of them aren't testable with any current technology.

The main theories are Supersymmetry, and String Theory.

String Theory posits that everything is composed of vibrating strings, that may close back on themselves, or curl, etc.

Supersymmetry proposes that the laws of nature remain consistent if you swap Bosons and Fermions, meaning each of the 25 elementary particles, whatever camp they fall into, must have a partner of the other type. Susy, however doesn't mention the mass of these particles, and they have not been revealed at currently achievable TeV scales.

One of the main reasons these theories haven't been discarded, or vulnerable to newer ones, is that there's a dogma about the aesthetic beauty of theories, that shields them from criticism.

Part of this shield is Naturalness, which judges a theory based on the number of things it depends on that can be considered improbable, and the distance between parameters and the number

Thoughts: How incredibly odd to presume that, as an individual tasked with understanding things underlying all that there is to understand, that you have the ability to say what is and isn't natural, or probable.

Drawing on aesthetics, physicists are bothered by numbers that don't display Naturalness. In theory space, Naturalness means a low level theory shouldn't sensitively depend on a high level theory. However, it's also about certain numbers, their closeness to or distance from one, and their size in comparison to other values- that which is too large or small is undesirable.

The Aesthetic is subjective, and thus not a useful guide towards Empirical knowledge.

For example, the speed of light is 299,792,458  m/s\small 299,792,458\; \text{m/s}, but it's also 1, in terms of light years. Physicists do not like when they are forced to treat a number as it is, and can't normalize it to 1, or "de-noise" it to one.

Because it does not conform to Naturalness, or their ideas of beauty in Mathematics, physicists have actually sought to poke holes in Quantum Mechanics, which has one of, if not the best track record of any theory.

In addition to this, there's also an issue of time- because it will often take a lifetime to test a new theory, Physicists can't wait until they can test it to judge it's quality, leading them to seek other, less scientifically rigorous avenues of assessing a theory.

Physics also gets caught up in the elegant end result of a theory, that likely started out as a messy idea, and while Physics & Maths benefit from each other, however, Physics is not Maths.

It's useful, because there's a very discernable line between correct and incorrect maths, however because math (at least at this level), is almost entirely abstract, or speaking about things we must conceptualize as oppose to experience, it can go much farther than our present day technology.

At this point, however, we've been able to at least agree on the The Standard Model, comprised of Fermions, Bosons, and the Four Fundamental Forces.

SUSY, pushes the SM further, saying that nothing would change if you swapped Bosons and Fermions, which indicates another set of mirror particles, however, no particles fit the properties of these mirror particles, and there's no certainty about what energy level (TeV or Gev) these Superpartner particles should/will appear at.

Referenced in

** Progressive Summary of The Hidden Rules of Physics**