Witty Rejoinder said:
A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws
For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/crisis-in-particle-physics-forces-a-rethink-of-what-is-natural-20220301/?
> The crisis became undeniable in 2016, when, despite a major upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva still hadn’t conjured up any of the new elementary particles that theorists had been expecting for decades.
Yes. No supersymmetric particles, no “technicolour” particles, no axions, no dark matter.
In fact, nothing beyond the standard model. Tetraquarks and pentaquarks are new, but aren’t outside the standard model. Massive neutrinos ditto.
> The hierarchy problem, as the puzzle is called, asks why the Higgs boson is so lightweight
I don’t see that as a problem. If the Higgs particle had any other weight then the universe wouldn’t be metastable on long time scales.
> You could feel the pessimism
I still feel it.
(skipping rest of article).
I posted in a thread not too long ago that I think that all (or almost all) fine tuning is the result of symmetry breaking. Such as symmetry breaking between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
If it was shown that dark matter followed a different gravity law to normal matter, as evidenced by a different strength of gravitational lensing, that would verify my hypothesis.
> Now a growing number of particle physicists think naturalness problems and the null results at the Large Hadron Collider might be tied to reductionism’s breakdown.
I’m not one of them. That leads to even worse fine tuning problems, much worse. It’s throwing out Occam’s razor.
The rest of the article – that there are huge numbers of very heavy unknown particles beyond the standard model whose effects just happen to almost precisely cancel one another out. I’m not buying it. People have been unsuccessfully bashing their head over that one with postulated large numbers of very heavy gravitons, without any sign of success, ever since the days of Feynman.
No. Symmetry breaking has to be the answer. for fine tuning.