Three physicists who have been collaborating in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past year have devised a new solution to a mystery that has beleaguered their field for more than 30 years. This profound puzzle, which has driven experiments at increasingly powerful particle colliders and given rise to the controversial multiverse hypothesis, amounts to something a bright fourth-grader might ask: How can a magnet lift a paperclip against the gravitational pull of the entire planet?
Despite its sway over the motion of stars and galaxies, the force of gravity is hundreds of millions of trillions of trillions of times weaker than magnetism and the other microscopic forces of nature. This disparity shows up in physics equations as a similarly absurd difference between the mass of the Higgs boson, a particle discovered in 2012 that controls the masses and forces associated with the other known particles, and the expected mass range of as-yet-undiscovered gravitational states of matter.
In the absence of evidence from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) supporting any of the theories previously proposed to explain this preposterous mass hierarchy—including the seductively elegant “supersymmetry”—many physicists have come to doubt the very logic of nature’s laws. Increasingly, they worry that our universe might just be a random, rather bizarre permutation among uncountable other possible universes—an effective dead end in the quest for a coherent theory of nature.
This month, the LHC launched its eagerly anticipated second run at nearly double its previous operating energy, continuing its pursuit of new particles or phenomena that would solve the hierarchy problem. But the very real possibility that no new particles lie around the corner has left theoretical physicists facing their “nightmare scenario.” It has also gotten them thinking.
“It is in moments of crisis that new ideas develop,” said Gian Giudice, a theoretical particle physicist at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, which houses the LHC.
The new proposal offers a possible way forward. The trio is “super excited,” said David Kaplan, 46, a theoretical particle physicist from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who developed the model during a West Coast sabbatical with Peter Graham, 35, of Stanford University and Surjeet Rajendran, 32, of the University of California, Berkeley.
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