See the update at the end of the post!
During one of our recent QC classes I was discussing the problem of epicycles in approaches to interpretations of quantum theory. The basic idea here is that we have an interpretation that looks really nice in a specific context, but when you go to more general settings (for something like de Broglie-Bohm) or test against reality (for something like GRW) you find that to save the interpretation you need to modify in ways you wouldn’t have thought to originally (dBB) or push some parameters back (GRW) to bring things in line with observation again.
During a small digression I mentioned that issues with supersymmetry are rather like what happens with GRW: You predict that a class of supersymmetric models that have very strong theoretical motivation should be seen at LHC-accessible levels of energy. Then you fail to see them and you go, well, there are these other models that only really show up at higher energy. Less compelling, but next in line…
And that’s fine in my opinion, but gradually one becomes increasingly unmoored from the strongest (empirically-based) motivations.
Anyway, I mentioned that the LHC has been rather heart-wrenching in this respect, at least for only partially-informed theorists like myself, due to its great success at finding something we were extremely confident it would find (the Higgs) and basically nothing else at the fundamental level.
Well, maybe there are some glimmers of hope? Check out this article:
These glimmers have been around for a while, but as the article describes, the imbalances in the decay of beauty quarks to electrons versus muons are becoming increasingly statistically significant. It’s way too early to be confident that we’re finding new physics, but a little bit of tentative excitement and interest seems justified!
Note however that even if there is an eventual discovery, it likely won’t be clear which of several beyond-standard model scenarios are the right one. And my read on this is that it would by no means be definitive evidence for supersymmetry. Still, discovering a new particle that hints at a new type of force, and the potential unification of quarks and leptons (electrons, muons, taus, and neutrinos) would be huge. For people interested in these sorts of things, these are developments worth keeping an eye on.
Update: Tommaso Dorigo posted a very detailed explanation of why folks shouldn’t get overly excited about the results mentioned in the post above. The statistical significance level supports further careful study (which the research team plans to carry out!), but could easily be explained as a fluke in the data at this stage. Here’s Tommaso’s post:
https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/another_3_sigma_fluke_from_lhcb-253707