Via the excellent new blog by two (so far) of our regular commenters, “Shores of the Dirac Sea”, (check it out!), I noticed that Brian Greene has an op-ed in the New York Times today.
For those of you who want a short version of some of the things that are hoped for from the large hadron collider (LHC), Brian’s piece is the article you might want to start with!
-cvj
Brian’s piece is very nice and I’m happy to see something accessible yet exciting in such a widely-circulated newspaper. Unfortunately, I can’t help but imagine that most people’s eyes glaze over when they see an article on science, especially physics. The only thing many people will remember about the LHC from their readings will be that (a) its an “atom smasher” and (b) it might create a black hole.
I just read Feynman’s talk on ‘What Is and What Should Be The Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society’ in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” and I’m necessarily skewed toward the pessimistic on science’s place in today’s culture.
Yes…. and no.
As I understand it, the earliest work on supersymmetric models were indeed on toy models of field theories that were more akin to string theory models than, say, particle physics models… but they were not string theories per se…. just interesting toy field theories.Update: Actually, I want to strengthen the above paragraph, after reading a reminder from Freund’s book “Introduction to Supersymmetry”. The mathematical threads of supersymmetry (algebraic constructions) apparently were appearing in the late sixties and early seventies, but 1971 saw Ramond, and Neveu and Schwarz introduce supersymmetry in the context of string theory in, I think, the first physical context, and independently of the other work. There’s also some independent work that was not in the string theory context at around the same time, by Gol’fand and Lichtman.
(Rest of what I said below stands…)
Lots of the development and application of the idea was first in the context (and by workers in) of string theory in those early years and some to come, before four dimensional models were constructed and studied in their own independent right.
String theories were also the first theories in which the role of supersymmetry was recognized as crucial for internal consistency, driving the compelling suggestion that if string theories have something to do with nature, then maybe nature might know something about supersymmetry.
So the essence of what he says is correct, I’d say.
-cvj
But he says that supersymmetry came out of string theory in the early 70s. Is that really true?
Brian Greene also has a piece in the Newsweek featuring CERN’s LHC. His writing is always enjoyable to read.