Why You Can’t Easily Dismiss the Cosmological Constant Problem

I’m still early on in my attempts to explain the “naturalness problem of the Standard Model” and its implications.  A couple of days ago I explained what particle physicists mean by the term “natural” — it means “typical” or “generic”.  And I described how, at least from one naive point of view, the Standard Model … Read more

Higgs Symposium: A More Careful Summary

My rather hasty, breathless and inconsistent summaries (#1, #2 and #3) of last week’s talks at the excellent Higgs Symposium (held at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics) clearly had their limitations.  So I thought it might be useful to give a more organized overview, with more … Read more

Is Supersymmetry Ruled Out Yet?

[A Heads Up: I’m giving a public lecture about the LHC on Saturday, April 28th, 1 p.m. New York time/10 a.m. Pacific, through the MICA Popular Talks series, held online at the Large Auditorium on StellaNova, Second Life; should you miss it, both audio and slides will be posted for you to look at later.] Is … Read more

Another Speed Bump for Superluminal Neutrinos

Here’s another major strike against the OPERA experiment’s claim of superluminal neutrinos, in addition to the Cohen-Glashow argument I described last week. It comes from a very natural place: the weak nuclear force. The theory (i.e. the equations) that we use, with great success, to predict the behavior of the weak nuclear force inextricably links some of the properties of neutrinos and charged leptons (electrons, muons and taus.) Because of this linkage, you simply can’t make neutrinos travel faster than light without making electrons do it too — by a smaller amount, to be sure, but still bigger than a part in a billion. And it turns out the effect is large enough that it should already have been detected by existing experiments, putting OPERA’s result further in doubt.

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Virtual Particles: Not Particles At All

Among the many tricky concepts which the layperson has to grapple with when learning about particle physics is something called “virtual particles”, which show up in cute pictures called “Feynman diagrams” along with “real particles”.  In most books for the public, some words are mumbled about the uncertainty principle and how virtual particles are particles … Read more

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