From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de   
      
   William Hyde  wrote or quoted:   
   >All of these (so far) unconfirmable ideas, supersymmetry and extra   
   >dimensional theories, have very nice mathematical properties which solve   
   >many heretofore difficult problems, like infinities that show up in   
   >equations where they have no right to be.  Mind you, if I'd spent my   
   >career working on supersymmetry I'd be getting pretty antsy about now   
   >given that we've yet to find a single supersymmetric particle.   
      
     In regular electrodynamics, if you treat an electron like a   
     perfect point, its electric field gets insanely strong the   
     closer you get, and the energy in that field just blows up to   
     infinity. That basically means the theory breaks down at super   
     small scales.   
      
     String theory flips that idea and says that what we call   
     "particles" like electrons aren't points at all - they're   
     these tiny strings that stretch a bit, so interactions aren't   
     happening at one exact spot. That spreads things out and gets   
     rid of those nasty infinities.   
      
     When people actually go through the math carefully, they find that   
     the theory only fully works if space has extra dimensions beyond   
     the usual three, so it ends up living in a higher-dimensional world.   
      
     New results from the Large Hadron Collider in 2025 really threw a   
     wrench in supersymmetry. They didn't find any of the new particles   
     SUSY was supposed to predict - no heavier versions of known particles,   
     even way up in the mass range. So most of the versions of SUSY   
     that were meant to fix big physics puzzles, like why particles   
     weigh what they do, just don't match what we're seeing anymore.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)