Unstrung? From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong, on what the Large Hadron Collider has actually told us:
Matt Strassler posts here about a recent panel discussion of phenomenologists talking about the implications of the latest results from the LHC. You can listen to the thing for yourself, and see what Matt has to say at his blog, but here are some things that I noticed from watching the discussion:
I don’t recall string theory even getting mentioned once. The extent to which string theory is now agreed to be thoroughly irrelevant to LHC physics is kind of striking. The few people like Kane claiming otherwise are being ignored as an embarrassment. If evidence for SUSY or extra dimensions had shown up, this would be very, very different.
Arkani-Hamed is probably the dominant personality in this field, and as Matt mentions, he embodies the conventional wisdom of the subject, expressing it at length and with brio. Back in 2005 he was claiming we would know whether SUSY solves the hierarchy problem within a year of LHC turn-on. Somewhat more than a year after LHC turn-on, in February 2011, he was saying that we’d have to wait until 2020. Now he’s putting it differently: it’s the “eleven and a halfth hour” for the idea of SUSY solving the hierarchy problem.
The only remaining hope for this is that there’s a light stop, which has so far escaped detection, and gluinos just above the current bounds.
It is going to be very interesting in the next decade if news settles in that the Large Hadron Collider provides no support for theories intended to rule out fine-tuning.
Theoreticians are already moving to put the multiverse beyond the reach of evidence/disconfirmation. Will compulsory multiverse teaching in schools (like compulsory Darwinism) follow?