From: wthyde1953@gmail.com   
      
   Stefan Ram wrote:   
   > 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.   
      
   Long ago I attended a lecture by one of the founders of string theory on   
   work  he and others did circa 1970.   
      
   This work involved replacing point particles in calculations with their   
   diameters in all calculations, thus giving them length, if still zero   
   volume.  This resulted in infinities that were easier to handle.  How   
   this evolved into today's string theory I do not know.   
      
   But the infinities I had in mind are those which show up in quantum   
   field theory.  I can recall learning transport theory in solid state.   
   All looks well, there's the equation, there's a reasonable formulation   
   for energy transport but ... at the far right of the equation is a term   
   that sums to infinity.  Get rid of that term and you have a useful   
   equation, but that's rather unsatisfactory.  Given supersymmetry,   
   however, that term vanishes neatly due, IIRC (and I probably don't) to   
   cancellations from a sea of virtual sypersymmetric particles).   
      
      
   >   
   >    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.   
      
   As I said.  I'd be worried.   
      
   The theory works to well for it to be utterly useless, but it seems that   
   something is seriously wrong, or seriously incomplete.   
      
   The nice thing about working with ice sheets is that you know they exist.   
      
   William Hyde   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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