Once you’ve read about the elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics — what we know about the world so far — you might want to learn something about supersymmetry — a speculative idea, whose proponents hope it will resolve several important puzzles about our world. I’ll get back to the puzzles, and whether and how supersymmetry might solve them, soon. Today’s article talks a bit about what this symmetry is, what its consequences are for particle physics, why an important bit of trickery is needed to hide the symmetry from obvious view, and how that trickery changes the particle physics implications.
As part of this article, I’ve put up a post about the difference between fermions and bosons. So those of you who have wondered Why is the Higgs particle called the `Higgs boson’? now get a chance to find out!
