In a new article in Science News, correspondent Tom Siegfried articulated a problem that has come up in bits and pieces in this show in recent weeks. This problem, put as simply as possible, is we don’t understand why the universe has the particles it has, and this is making it really hard to figure out what undiscovered particles are out there waiting to be discovered as the bits of stuff behind dark matter and maybe even dark energy.

In trying to guess at what might be out there, physicists have, as they always have, relied on ideas of symmetry. This sometimes works; symmetry allowed us to figure out the three families of particles that make up the detectable universe, from the foundational quarks, up through to the protons, neutrons, and other particles they build.

Symmetry does not always help, though. Early researchers trying to understand the motions of the planets relied on the ideas of perfect symmetry in Plato’s Solids. From Ptolemy and Copernicus down through Kepler’s early work, planets were assumed to orbit in perfect circles, and since perfect circular orbits don’t match what we see, planets going in circles attached to circles, and other crazy combinations of perfect shapes were utilized to try and force symmetry into celestial motions. It didn’t work, and it was only in considering the imperfect ellipse, which is only symmetrical if cut in half just right, that Kepler solved planetary motion by throwing away complete symmetry, and now we know that all orbits are ellipses, even if circular.

With particle physics, we know that there is symmetry in what we see today. We know that there are things missing from our model. In trying to find what’s missing, researchers such as Nobel prize winner Steven Weinberg have created new families of symmetric particles that they can mathematically describe but that no one has been able to find. This is the theory of supersymmetry and its myriad of supersymmetric particles that are paired to the particles we have already found. While this theory hints at underlying math that explains their characteristics, it lacks underlying physics. Newton eventually found gravity to explain orbits, but no one has found that thing that makes the standard model work or leads us to other particles.

And with each new set of observations, we are eliminating more and more predicted possible particles and not finding any.

Within the next two years, the combined efforts of the Large Hadron Collider, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and all the neutrino and gamma-ray detectors around the world are either going to rule out supersymmetry or finally find something. But we’ve already ruled out a lot, and it is time for us to start saying, “Let’s break the concepts of symmetry, and look at things from a less perfect angle.”

As any artist knows, it is not in perfectly centering and perfectly mirroring scenes that beauty is found. The Golden Ratio and all its mathematical siblings bring beauty to everything from photography to flower petals to the shape of spiral galaxies. Beauty comes in the asymmetry, and perhaps, even at the most fundamental level, at the level of particle physics, it is now time to look for asymmetry as the answer.

More Information

Science News article