Supersymmetry forever

The title of this thread was inspired by the unsuccessful search for the hypothesized "supersymmetry particles" at the LHC at CERN over the past decade.

Since then, I have become increasingly skeptical of some of the most significant "extrapolations" in physical science, including the Big Bang theory itself.

Gradually, the cracks are widening as new observations from the JWST continue to defy predictions:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01937-7

Ultimately I predict that there will be no evidence of any beginning in JWST data.

Sbu,

My gut feeling is much like yours. For a long time science dealt with phenomena that could be pretty thoroughly explored - electricity, magnetism, heat, chemistry, even quantum mechanics. However, more recent developments seem to be more and more tenuous, and maybe open to fraud. For example, is it conceivable that data from the JWST that goes back even further in time (as you suggest), is not being discussed while people wrangle over what to do with it?

To me the whole "dark matter" hypothesis is phoney. The fact that this had to be proposed means that the current theory of gravity, is approximate. It works reasonably well on the scale of the solar system, but not on an inter-galactic scale. I always think of PV=RT - a beautiful equation which became tarnished for me when I learned that it is only approximate, and goes badly wrong at low temperatures and/or high densities. If science only admitted that its equations are only tested over a finite range.

Dark matter also seems to be a lousy theory because it isn't just that stars don't rotate within a galaxy at the speed predicted by NG/GR, in many cases they also rotate at just the right speed to preserve a spiral structure. That doesn't seem consistent with a perturbation due to an arbitrary amount of dark matter.

Similar dodgy reasoning seems to have also infected modern physics. For example, when quarks were first proposed, an intensive search was performed looking for these objects. Objects with fractional charge would have been detectable using a Milikan oil drop experiment. As I understand it, except for one or two false alarms, no such particles were detected, so someone came up with the idea that the force between two quarks grows as they separate in space, so they can never be observed singly! That cludge lies at the base of the Standard Model of HEP!

I don't think science can proceed much further without pruning out everything that is not rigorously known to be true.

David

I fully agree with you. Dark matter and Dark energy are just stop gap solutions to make existing equations fit  with more data. But eventually even more data coming in from increasingly sophisticated apparatus like JWST and the LHC will make things break apart.

These and similar observations formed the basis of the section of Skeptiko called "Why Science is wrong...about almost everything". This was also the title of Alex's book, and although it was obviously an exaggeration, it was remarkably close to reality! See Rupert Sheldrake's book on a similar theme:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Delusio...B006L9G9I6

There are some shocking things in there, such as the fact that attempts to demonstrate the conservation of energy in biological systems, were not successful and were ultimately fudged to make it look as if there were no problem.

Alex has since grown wary of letting people discuss their own topics of interest on his website, and IMHO it is sad to see his once remarkable website dwindling away.

I also accept the evidence exposed by various books put out by the Discovery Institute (with associated scientific papers) that evolution by natural selection can't explain large scale evolution.

David