Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 84: Inspiration always comes unexpectedly

　　After a few moments, Orion tapped down a line and asked.

　　[What if we can't find it?]

　　The old gentleman typed quickly and waited less than five minutes before responding to his question.

　　[The possibility you speak of certainly exists, if we can't find what we need at energy scales below TeV, we'll have to declare failure of the standard model of minimal supersymmetry and go up to higher energy regions to find what we're looking for. Proving our earlier work wrong is an equally important discovery, though not necessarily one we'd like to see ...... but I think you can actually have a little more confidence in our theory, the New World is just around the corner, I can even smell the fragrance of the spices].

　　Towards the end, the old gentleman even joked with him in a light tone.

　　Only, Orion wasn't so optimistic and couldn't laugh at all.

　　Maybe it was because he hadn't experienced that feeling of drilling in the labyrinth of the quantum world for decades, so he hadn't cultivated the spirit of humour that a theoretical physicist must have when confronted with an unsolved mystery.

　　Not being able to figure out a problem doesn't frustrate him.

　　But if a study has no end in sight and no future in sight, it is hard to keep him from feeling irritated.

　　Yes, that's the feeling he gets with this subject.

　　Even if there was a Nobel Prize winner in the team, it was impossible to draw a reliable path for him in a confident tone. There were countless ways to do it, and all they could do was compare the probabilities.

　　Unlike the maths problems he worked on, wrong is wrong and right is right. The review may take time, but it will surely end up being a conclusion to his endeavours.

　　And it's not just the dilemmas of the subject he's working on that make Orion feel annoyed, it's the dilemmas of the entire theoretical physics community.

　　The development of theory is so far out of step with experiment that the edifice is not even built on rigorous experimental data, but rather on a line of stuff that hasn't been tested experimentally, and won't be tested at all for decades.

　　Based on the proven theories and limited phenomena to put forward conjectures, and then use countless conjectures to build a model, theoretical physics relies on the "standard model", is probably such a "unreliable" thing.

　　In the sixties, supersymmetry was proposed, and in the eighties, string theory emerged, but only a few years ago, the God particle was found in the laboratory, and the theoretical physics community hastily declared that it had entered the era of the "post-standard model", and before it had time to be excited for two years, an oscillation of neutrinos in Daya Bay almost brought down the standard model again.

　　Orion can understand why Mr Frank is so obsessed with supersymmetry theory and so eager to find supersymmetric particles.

　　This obsession is definitely not because of anything as superficial as a bet, but because if supersymmetry theory is not established, the holes in the Standard Model cannot be patched, and the string theory built on the basis of supersymmetry theory will collapse ......

　　If these things ever happen, there will be quite a few people, who will surely ask them the solid question - "What the hell have you been doing for the last half century?"

　　If the theoretical physics was just like the news. Today this is discovered, tomorrow that is disproved, the day after that this is solidly established, and every day is a new page ......