The ugly truth

• Autores: Daniel Cossins
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3167, 2018, págs. 30-33
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Physicists have long believed the universe must be beautiful. Here, Cossins asks what if they're wrong. That's the disquieting possibility being entertained by a growing band of physicists in the aftermath of what should have been the breakthrough discovery of the decade, the snaring of the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs, at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed a long-held theory about how particles acquire mass. But what we have -- and haven't -- found alongside it could have profound consequences for how we view reality, says Michael Dine, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the end of the day, naturalness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; one person's simple solution is another's rococo monstrosity. But most theorists still want to be seduced. If this means they must update their visions of beauty to suit changing times, or even abandon them altogether, then so be it