Earlier quoted context omitted.
Falsifying supersymmetry is like falsifying Ptolemaic epicycles. You can never falsify it with data because epicycles can always be constructed to fit any data set [1]. Likewise, a sypersymmetric theory can be constructed to fit any set of parameters. But fitting the data is not enough. You have to fit the data with substantially fewer parameters than data points. That's the challenge. [1] https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Indeed. Are you suggesting, perhaps, that the promoters of the LHC were making claims that they knew could not be satisfied by it - or, perhaps, that nothing they said could reasonably be interpreted as such a claim? The trouble is, I don't know which specific claims Hossenfelder is basing her allegations on.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-c...
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Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money.
The big proclamations came almost exclusively from theoretical physicists; CERN didn’t promise anything they didn’t deliver. That is an important distinction, but I am afraid in the public perception the subtler differences won’t matter. It’s “physicists said.” And what physicists said was wrong. Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow.
What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up.
I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in an energy range of about a TeV (ie accessible at the LHC) “to avoid finetuning.”
I don’t mean to pick on Mangano in particular; his slides are just the first example that Google brought up. This was the argument why the LHC should see something new: To avoid finetuning and to preserve naturalness.
I explained many times previously why the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty. Luckily I no longer have to repeat these warnings, because the data agree that naturalness isn’t a good argument.