As we know, string theory has been claimed not to have any single proposal for an experimental verification. But, of course, without entering into a neverending discussion, there are some important points that could give strong support to the view string theory entails. Indeed, so far there are two essential points that research on string theory produced and that should be confirmed as soon as possible: AdS/CFT correspondence and supersymmetry. Both these theoretical results are strongly supported by the research pursued by our community. For the first point, understanding of QCD spectrum, with or without quarks, through the use of AdS/CFT correspondence is a very active field of research with satisfactory results. I have discussed here this matter several times and I have pointed out the very good work of Stan Brodsky and Guy de Teramond as an example for this kind of research (e.g. see this). Soft-wall model discussed by these authors seems in a very good agreement with the current scenario that is arisen in our understanding of Yang-Mills theory that I emphasized several times in this blog.

About supersymmetry I should say that I am at the forefront since I have presented this paper. The mass gap obtained in Yang-Mills theory arising from nonlinearities has an interesting effect when considered for the quartic scalar field interecting with a gauge field and spinor fields. Taking a coupling for the self-interaction of the scalar field being very large, all the conditions for supersymmetry are fulfilled and all the interacting fields get identical masses and coupling. This implies that, if the mechanism that produces mass in QCD and Standard Model is the same, the Higgs field must be supersymmetric. I call this field Higgs, notwithstanding it has lost some important characteristics of a Higgs field, because is again a scalar field inducing masses to the other fields interacting with it. So, if current experiments should confirm this scenario this would be a big hit for physics ending with a complete understanding of the way mass arises in our world both for the macroscopic and the microscopic world.

So, we can conclude that our research area is producing some relevant conclusions that could address research in more fundamental areas as quantum gravity in a well-defined direction. I think we will get some great news in the near future. As for the present, I am happy to have given an important contribution to this research line.

Supersymmetry: Dark Matter Elementary Particles (Heavy, Spin: 1/2)

Me near the actual tower from which Galileo dropped an apple, hitting Newton on the head and leading to the invention of both impact and gravity*

Continued at The Guardian.

“In our picture, quarks and gluons can’t flutter in and out of existence unless they are inside hadrons,” says team member Craig Roberts of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. As a result, the vacuum is much calmer and, crucially, the problem it poses for the cosmological constant is reduced. Read the full story at NewScientist

More brain food. Yummy.

Related Articles

• Reexamining nothing: is the vacuum of space really empty? (arstechnica.com)
• Gravitational lens makes dark energy less mysterious (arstechnica.com)
• Expanding Universe and the Mysterious Force of Dark Energy (brighthub.com)

The conference on “Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions“, which my colleagues and I organised in Bonn, finished yesterday. The entire week I was thinking I would drop into bed and sleep for a full day. But oddly, I feel quite refreshed. It was great fun listening to the talks and discussing with so many friends and colleagues, despite all the organisational headaches. The conference dinner was on an elegant boat which in an earlier life was used for the signing ceremony of the Schengen agreement. (For us mainland Europeans this is a big deal.)

Supersymmetry seems alive and well and ready to face the challenge from the LHC. But what is supersymmetry? And what is so super about it? Why are we so taken with it, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence it actually exists? There are two main arguments, first it is a solution to the `hierarchy problem’. I will save this for a potential second post, if Jon invites me back. The other is indeed an aesthetic argument related to the `Coleman-Mandula theorem’.

Now, I tell myself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror, that aesthetics is for wimps, but it is all the same an interesting argument.

Symmetries have become a central pillar of our understanding of nature. A sphere is symmetric in the sense that if you leave me in a room with the sphere and come back in, you can not tell if and by possibly how much and about which axis I have rotated the sphere. The sphere is highly symmetric. This however also makes a sphere kind of boring, since it has to be the same in every direction it has no structure. If the sphere has a pattern on it, like for example an old black and white football, only very specific rotations are still undetectable, this is the remaining, reduced symmetry.

It turns out that in the world of elementary particles there are two types of symmetries. One kind are internal symmetries. These govern the forces of nature like the electromagnetic force. Here a hidden, internal, property of particles is changed. The other kind we call external symmetries and they affect the way particles fly through space and time. The appropriate external symmetry is described by special relativity, invented by Einstein in 1905. The undetectable transformations are called Lorentz transformations. In this case the laws of nature are unchanged if we look at them for example on a stationary train or one moving with constant velocity (and on smooth tracks!).

Now how about Coleman and Mandula? They showed that in fact the Lorentz symmetries are the maximal external symmetry allowed in nature. If you were to introduce a larger more extensive symmetry the world would become so boring that particles could no longer interact. They would just fly around freely in space not knowing about each other. In their argument Coleman and Mandula however neglected one external property of particles, their spin. This is a peculiar quantum property, they behave as if they had a small internal magnet. In specific units all the matter particles we know, e.g. the electron and the quarks have spin 1/2. The force carriers like the photon have spin 1. Spin is an external property, which is affected by rotations in space. Now if we extend Coleman and Mandula and allow for discrete changes of spin by half a unit, we find a new maximal external symmetry of nature. This is supersymmetry. It is super because it goes beyond the previous external symmetries. If nature is supersymmetric the electron must have a partner with spin 0 and the photon a partner with spin 1/2 and all with many interactions.

However, if this symmetry were at all extended (taking now also spin into account, of course) the resulting world would be boring and trivial with no interactions. Since we have now used up all external particle properties we believe this is the end of the line. This is what makes supersymmetry so special….and to some beautiful.

Back in Geneva after the SUSY meeting in Bonn and a day in the mountains.

One of us is not talking physics

The return journey wasn’t as pleasant as the outward one. The train didn’t turn up at Bonn Hauptbahnhof so we were taxied across town. This meant a 30min delay and I missed both the next connections. However, via Mannheim, Basel and Bern, I made it in the end*.

The SUSY meeting made it on to German TV in a report starring Herbi Dreiner but briefly featuring me listening to my own talk, thanks to some nifty editing**. As far as I can tell with my poor German language skills the report looks fun & informative – good when physics is news. Herbi is a bit of a “science in public” star anyway, having won the European Physical Society prize last year for his physics show, something I hope he gets to perform in the UK soon.

ATLAS Luminosity

I can’t really give an account of the meeting because I could only be there for one day. But even on that day you could see the change of mood now people are finally showing LHC data rather than simulations. So far the data don’t break new ground in SUSY, but it won’t be long at this rate. The plot shows the amount of data collected by ATLAS from LHC collisions. Not only is it increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing. When we have about 50pb^-1*** we will be passing the Tevatron in the search for SUSY. By this time next year we expect to have about 1000pb^-1. (Today we have three…)

I said I might give an argument as to whether or not supersymmetry “looks nice” (apart from the Higgs mass and Dark Matter arguments I gave earlier).

Briefly my take on it is that it introduces a symmetry between the force-carrying particles (photon, W, Z, gluon) and the others (quarks and leptons). Symmetries in nature general make things look more compact and natural.

Unfortunately, if SUSY is going to solve the Dark Matter problem and the Higgs mass problem, it has to be a broken symmetry, because otherwise all the SUSY particles would have the same mass as the Standard Model particles. And they don’t, or we would have seen the SUSY particles already. Plus SUSY does not explain why all the Standard Model particles have the particular values of mass that they have. So it introduces lots more arbitrary parameters into the theory (to do with the masses of the SUSY particles, how they mix up, and how supersymmetry is broken). This is why it is so “flexible” as I described before, but it also makes it less predictive and less aesthetically pleasing. Or “nice”.

Herbi couldn’t remember whether it was a napkin or not. But he is better qualified than me to explain the good bits about SUSY (the theory, not the conference), and will do so shortly I hope.

* And despite this delay I am still a fan of Deutsche Bahn, especially their website which is the only way I know to sensibly book European rail journeys (even outside Germany).

** Any diehard fans can find a video of the almost identical talk I gave in Paris here (Friday session). The idea behind it is essentially the idea behind this.

*** That’s inverse picobarns, a unit I will not expain here. Yet.

Next week I am giving a talk a the SUSY 2010 conference in Bonn.

It is a bit weird that there have been seventeen of these annual SUSY (for “SUperSYmmetry”), meetings, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence for SUSY. Perhaps it’s excusable. SUSY is still the best way I’m aware of to improve the Standard Model of particle physics.

To me the three biggest arguments in its favour are: One, it plugs an important hole in the theory. Two, it sort-of-predicts Dark Matter. Three, it looks nice.

Something looking nice in Bonn.

The first is to do with why the Higgs boson is not millions of times heavier than it is. Given we don’t know whether there is a Higgs yet, that’s a pretty forward-looking concern, but it is a real worry for the credibility of the theory. Basically without it, the Standard Model looks like a coincidence on the level of one in ten-thousand-million-million (10¹⁶). This is 100 times less likely than winning the lottery jackpot two weeks running if you buy a single ticket each week. SUSY introduces some quantum cancellations which make the Higgs mass much more stable, and therefore plausible. Still, maybe the universe got lucky. Some string theorists might say we should be glad it’s not one in 10⁵⁰⁰.

The second is the most compelling to me, since astronomical observations tell us there is probably some Dark Matter out there (or else we really do not understand gravity) and many SUSY models predict a particle which would be an ideal candidate for Dark Matter. It may be right behind you. When two different branches of science have problems which seem to converge on the same solution, look out for progress.

The third point is arguable and I may argue it later, but not now.

Another feature of SUSY is its flexibility. It can appear in many different guises in an experiment, to the extent that almost any weird event we see could (and will, I bet you) be interpreted as a “hint of SUSY”.

For example, a big part of my doctoral thesis involved simulating a SUSY process which we might have seen at the electron-proton collider, HERA. When you whack protons and electrons together, one thing which might happen is that the quarks in the proton stick to the electron. This would be a “leptoquark” (because electrons are leptons) and would be a sign of the unification of the strong, weak and electromagentic interactions, so-called “Grand Unification”. Very exciting stuff.

Just before we switched on, JoAnne Hewitt realised that the signature of a leptoquark also looked like a particular form of SUSY. Herbi Dreiner, then a postdoc at Oxford (and now organiser of SUSY2010) had realised that if so, there would other ways it could decay, and he calculated them.

I remember his calculation being given me on a napkin, but my memory may be embellishing here. Anyway, I wrote a program predicting how the results would look in our detector, so we could search for them.

Sadly they never showed up, though we did have a bit of a false alarm at one point.

Not-so-coincidentally, SUSY is one of the things we might also find at the LHC. In fact I have even written a couple of papers on some possible signatures. (Which is why I am talking at SUSY10). Basically I had a new experimental technique, and was looking for applications. SUSY provides some.

This flexibility makes SUSY a good test-case for experimentalists to make sure we aren’t missing anything. If we are alert to all possible SUSY processes, we are alert to a very wide range of weird stuff.

However, when weird stuff doesn’t show up, as so far it has not, that unfortunately does not disprove SUSY, it just rules out a given subset of SUSY models. This can be frustrating.

Still, to its credit, if there is no low mass Higgs, SUSY loses much of its attraction. It would not quite be ruled out, but it would certainly be relegated down the ranks of speculative theories. Conversely, if we do find a Higgs, the search for SUSY will become much more compelling.

Meanwhile, I had better write my talk.

Suppose we fail at discovering the Higgs boson and SUSY (supersymmetry) at LHC – do physicists have an alternative theory on mass generation and supersymmetry? And if not, will the data from LHC be enough for physicists to invent a replacement of (part of) the Standard Model?

This was part of my concern on sometimes overwhelming self-confidence that physicists have in the established science models. Lord Kelvin for example, was strongly convinced that in his time, only a minuscule part of the knowledge of the natural world was unknown to mankind. I guess that since his time, the world-view of the science community had changed, as the myriad of beautiful strange theories emerged.

After all, the Standard Model had survived the test of time many times, as it became the most precise theory, along with the General Theory of Relativity. And even if its part with the Higgs boson and/or supersymmetry fails,  the good guys will find a way to fix it. At least, this is what David Gross ensures me in his answer:

What happens if the LHC fails to find the Higgs boson?

My view is that just a mechanism could be seen in Nature to produce masses and I expect that this is the same already seen for QCD. So, supersymmetry is mandatory. This will imply a further effort for people at work to uncover Higgs particle as they should also say to us what kind of self-interaction is in action here and if it is a supersymmetric particle, as it should.

The interesting point is that all the burden of the spectrum of the standard model will rely, not on the mechanism that generates masses but on the part of the model that breaks supersymmetry.

Interesting developments are expected in the future. Higgs is always Higgs but a rather symmetric one. So, stay tuned!

The speaker was of course Stephen Hawking and the occasion was his inauguration as Lucasian Professor in Cambridge. The version of supersymmetry that had him so excited was N=8 Supergravity in 4 dimensions. Cautiously he predicted that a complete theory of particle physics could be worked out in 20 years time using this new superunified theory.

30 years have passed and we know that things did not work out quite as Hawking has hoped. He thought that N=8 supergravity might be a unique candidate for a fully unified theory of physics, although the particles we now know as fundamental would have to be composite. He did not consider higher dimensional theories because he thought that details such as the number of spacetime dimensions could be explained by anthropomorphic arguments.

A few years later, supergravity was replaced by superstring theories and higher dimensions became mandatory. The underlying theory still possesses a similar uniqueness but now anthropomorphic arguments are needed to  select the real world vacuum from a vast landscape of possibilities that superstring theory offers. Hawking has now retired as Lucasian professor to be replaced by one of superstrings’ pioneers,  Michael Green. Supersymmetry and superstrings face a skeptical backlash from a large section of the younger generation who are disillusioned by its failure to provide clear predictions for particle physics or cosmology after so much time.

Now the table may be turning full circle and this time support for supersymmetry comes not just from theory, but from experiment too. The version of supersymmetry that has come to the fore is the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model – an extension of the well established Standard Model of particle physics that includes an additional broken supersymmetry. This leads to one superpartner for every familiar particle that we know already, plus an alternative Higgs sector with fives Higgs particles, two of them charged.

The MSSM first appeared just a year after Hawking’s lecture. Since its early days it has been understood that it improves the naturalness of low energy particle physics due to anomaly cancellations that help keep the Higgs sector light. With the addition of supersymmetry the three running coupling constants converge at one energy point, suggesting a dessert of new physics up to a more complete unification at the GUT scale. The model also provides a natural R-parity symmetry that would make its lightest particle stable. This offers a unique candidate for dark matter whose stability would otherwise be very hard to explain.

For the last decade or perhaps more, theorists have been anticipating the imminent discovery of supersymmetry in the world’s highest energy particle accelerators. Fermilab was thought to have a chance of discovery with the Tevatron and there were even some false starts that faded away as the statistics grew. Now their hopes turn to the Large Hadron Collider but the Tevatron is not finished yet. In recent months we have seen some tantalising results reported by Fermilab that support the MSSM.  Nothing is conclusive yet, but the combined evidence all seems to point in the right direction.

For those of us who grow up with the idea that supersymmetry is the final move in a game of unification that leads inevitably to a complete theory, these reports are too hard to dismiss. After the ICHEP conference we drool over the results that should have been shown, but weren’t. Plots which show inconclusive signals of less than 3-sigmas statistical significance are quick and easy to approve for publication. They don’t lead to big headlines. Anything above three sigmas would count as an observation and that puts it in a different league of results. With some history of failed observations from the past, Fermilab are likely to put off publication until the next round of data is seen to add rather than subtract from the result. For us the outsiders, the mere absence of certain plots starts to look like a sign to get excited about.

For the supersymmetry skeptics the conclusions to be drawn are different. Any signal below 3 sigma is to be dismissed as noise. They can even dismiss the exclusion of the Higgs mass range that now strongly supports a light Higgs sector as predicted by supersymmetry. It is indirect and still inconclusive.

If supersymmetry is indeed just below the surface, what will happen next? The Tevatron will continue to analyse the data they have while collecting some more until about 2013. The signal will grow until it is clear that something new has been seen. The LHC will not have the luminosity to see the low mass Higgs sector before the Tevatron, but supersymmetry will offer other new particles of higher mass. The LHC might pick out some of those very quickly and start to study their properties. Very soon the parameter space of supersymmetric models will be narrowed down. There will be a huge spurt of activity amongst theorists as they figure out how particle physics works at this scale. If there really is a desert of new physics beyond supersymmetry it may be possible to work out a convincing scenario for physics right up to the GUT scale. Possibly the next generation of accelerators will be needed to pin down most of the coupling constants. If they are clever enough, there may be enough information to figure out the mechanism for breaking supersymmetry at the GUT scale. That could reveal a perfectly supersymmetric world at higher energies with far fewer free parameters.

It will not stop there. If supersymmetry is part of gauge field unfication then its unbroken gauge form will include supergravity. The experimenters will have had their day again as theory pushes into higher energies with renewed confidence. How far it will run is hard to say but the connection between supersymmetry and quantum gravity is hard to pull apart. Knowing the details of supersymmetry at the electroweak scale could be enough to lead us to the end of theoretical particle physics in the sense that Hawking predicted 30 years ago. Perhaps even superstrings will suddenly look right again. Until we have the next results from experiment we cannot be sure, but that is what makes the current situation so exciting. In just a few years - perhaps even just months - a renaissance of  particle physics merging experiment and theory might be well underway. It might pan out in a less predictable way than I have suggested here, but it is sure to be revealing, if it happens at all.

Update: see also the discussion on Lubos blog, and of course his many detailed pages extolling the virtues of supersymmetry.

Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC

“It’s reassuring that from day one the LHC plunges into out-of-the-box searches that some call exotic. My hunch is that, if there’s any new physics at the TeV scale at all, it will take some unexpected form that will require non-standard techniques to discover. And the added value is that in these less explored corners of particle phenomenology interesting results and non-trivial limits can be obtained relatively fast, even during the first year of the LHC running.”

via Blogging ICHEP 2010: Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC.

“The CMS experiment presented results from their program to search for another type of exotic particle—stopped gluinos. These particles, if created in LHC collisions, would stop in the CMS detector, live a relatively long time compared to the infinitesimal lifetimes of particle like a top quark, and then decay into other particles. CMS physicists hunt these particles by collecting data between collisions of bunches of protons in the LHC beam. The DZero experiment has previously searched for the particles, and determined that they could not exist with a lifetime longer than 30 microseconds. With only a few months’ worth of data, CMS has now excluded the existence of these particles with a lifetime between 75 nanoseconds and 6 microseconds.”

via symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » LHC results: Not just the same old thing

]]> http://pjzen.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/schedule-for-lhc%e2%80%99s-next-few-years-revealed/ Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:35:20 +0000 PJ http://pjzen.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/schedule-for-lhc%e2%80%99s-next-few-years-revealed/ The race is on, or continuing between the LHC and the Tevatron.  Regular readers know of my passion for particle physics. I find the work they are doing at the accelerators endlessly fascinating. Will they find this Higgs? Personally I don’t think so. Can I back that up with a reasoned argument? Nope. But, there are some very brilliant theoretical physicists who can. My point, I don’t have a horse in this race. I am watching it for the beauty of the game. It is beautiful.

“Steve Myers, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, presented the LHC schedule for the next 10 years today in the first plenary presentation at the International Conference on High Energy Physics. Myers also presented his predictions for the amount of data that the LHC may collect over the same time period. These predictions over the next few years will be scrutinized closely by scientists at Fermilab’s Tevatron, who have proposed extending the accelerator’s life for a further 3 years.” Read full Story»

via symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » Schedule for LHC’s next few years revealed.

* The diagram below outlines the major Eras of the Universe according to the Big Bang Theory. Click the picture for many more details and a larger image. The one line in the article that caught my attention the most was at the end.

“One important point is that since everything that we learn about the Universe comes from light (photons), if there are no photons there is no information. Thus, before the end of the era of nuclei, we have no information since the photons were trapped. We will never see this era of the Universe with photons, but maybe gravity waves (?).”

That is a point that has been bothering me. Since we can’t “see” most of the Universe why do some (not all) scientists cling so tightly to one theory to the exclusion of all others? Isn’t it possible the standard model is wrong? Or, Isn’t is possible string theory is wrong? or M-theory? or even the Big Bang Theory? People use to think the theory of a geocentric universe was true. We agreed to get over that. Well, most of us did. I am just saying Science is about keeping an open mind about the facts. And the facts are, at the moment, most of the Universe is still invisible.

via Astronomy 309: COSMOLOGY.

Sir Harry Kroto, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Bob Curl and Rick Smalley for the discovery of buckyballs, said, “This most exciting breakthrough provides convincing evidence that the buckyball has, as I long suspected, existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy.”

Buckyballs are also known as fullerenes. Here’s what is being talked about:

Isn’t it amazing that the universe generates such strikingly symmetrical objects? Don’t they appear to be the products of mind and design (and not of blind chance)?

Hmm.

Kurzweil.net defines a buckyball this way:

Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules first observed in a Rice University laboratory 25 years ago. Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional, spherical structures. Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons match a typical black-and-white soccer ball. The research team also found the more elongated relative of buckyballs, known as C₇₀, for the first time in space. These molecules consist of 70 carbon atoms and are shaped more like an oval rugby ball. Both types of molecules belong to a class known officially as buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes. They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

In the above quote, did you catch that part about buckyballs being “named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes”? In other words, an architect’s structure—something that was once thought to have had its origin in an architect’s mind—has been found in nature.

That’s curious, isn’t it?

And would it be more curious, or less curious, if a human architect’s structure was found floating in space at the macro-level (as opposed to the micro-level)? In other words, is its nano-level size influencing our judgment about how strange this really is? 

How, in the name of heaven and earth, did so elegant a carbon molecule end up floating about in space? The most direct answer is that it’s the sloughed off byproduct of an aging star. Scientists detected it in a nebula. Like you and me, buckyballs are the carbon dust of stars. But does that solve the riddle? Given enough time and chance, is everything, sooner or later, bound to happen? Maybe we’re part of a multiverse, and we just live in one of the universes where its chemistry must make, under occasional conditions, carbon buckyballs. No big whoop. I eagerly await news that the Pantheon has also been found free-floating about in space (in our universe, or in another; at the nano-scale or otherwise).

But whether by accident or design, it’s wonderful to think that both the carbon-based Buckminster Fuller and the carbon-based buckyball share the same mother—the belly of a star. And it’s even more wonderful to think that the stars, which make both us and buckyballs possible, may themselves be the products of an even deeper and more unifying symmetry—a supersymmetry.

Here’s Leonardo’s man revealed in symmetry:

And here’s a buckyball profiling its symmetry:

If you’re an atheist (or an agnostic, as I am), isn’t it nevertheless tempting to ask of the fullerene molecule questions similar to those that Blake asked of his tiger?:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      .
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

This past week, I’ve been reading an exceptionally well written book by a Catholic physicist, Stephen Barr. The book is titled Modern Physics and Ancient Faith  (Notre Dame 2003), and on page 87 Barr writes this about the universe’s layered symmetries:

The fact that the electron field has uniform properties throughout all of space is itself a statement that the electron field possesses a very large degree of symmetry, in fact a much greater degree of symmetry than is enjoyed by any specific set of electron particles or carbon atoms.

Thus we see the same result repeated again and again as we trace phenomena down through layer after layer to the deeper levels of the world’s structure. The symmetries and patterns found at one level are manifestations of greater symmetries and more comprehensive patterns lying concealed at the more fundamental levels.

Some think that symmetry chasing on the part of physicists, though historically beneficial to science, has arrived at a dead-end. In other words, supersymmetry and the so-called “M theory” of string theorists, are phantoms. Surely, a contingent and godless universe does not, at its most fundamental level, hang together in so tidy a fashion. And it would actually be quite a shock to discover that, yes, indeed, it does.

If you are an atheist, and you discovered that the universe does hold together in a supersymmetry, would that be enough for you to reconsider your atheism?

Is supersymmetry the last refuge of God?

The question: Can science explain everything?

 How about the eleventh dimension?

Science and religion are poised to come face to face as physicists begin to realize that this planet we call earth and the universe it resides in, are a part of an infinite number of universes all residing in the eleventh dimension. 
 

In the early years of the 20th century, the atom  long believed to be the smallest building block of matter  was proven to consist of even smaller components called protons, neutrons and electrons, which are known as subatomic particles.

Beginning in the 1960s, other subatomic particles were discovered. In the 1980s, it was discovered that protons and neutrons ( hadrons) are themselves made up of smaller particles called quarks.

In the 1980s, a new mathematical model of theoretical physics called string theory emerged. It showed how all the particles, and all of the forms of energy in the universe, could be constructed by hypothetical one-dimensional “strings,” infinitely small building-blocks that have only the dimension of length, but not height or width. Further, string theory suggested that the universe is made up of multiple dimensions.

 As we are familiar with height, width, and length as three dimensional space, and time gives a total of four observable dimensions. However, string theories initially supported the possibility of ten dimensions the remaining 6 of which we can’t detect directly. This was later increased to 11 dimensions based on various interpretations of the ten dimensional theory that led to five partial theories as described below. Super-gravity theory also played a significant part in establishing the existence of the 11th dimension.

Quantum theory is the set of rules that describes the interactions of these particles.