My Supersymmetry

It's round two for the Large Hadron Collider. After an initial set of power failures, catastrophic contamination of the coollant, a man going on TV to say that it was 'sabotaging itself... from the future!' and many grumbles, both from people expecting and not expecting the end of the universe as we know it at the hands of the Swiss, they're turning it on again. At half power.

'But what's the point!?' I hear you cry, 'What's the point in spending a gazillion Euros on an accelerator that is now only very slightly less powerful than the world's existing particle accelerators?' Well, the physics boffs swear they'll crank up the rev's when they're confident that it won't end time and space but that's kind of irrelevant since the thing that they're looking for, the Higgs boson, is supposed to exist at energy ranges well within half of the LHC's power (at about 120 - 118 gigaelectronvolts).

So why do we need this universally-uninsurable underground light-speed ferris wheel? Because ultimately what we're looking for is not the 'God particle' that Dan (Daniel) Brown based his 'comeback' on but for evidence of super-symmetry.

Supersymmetry essentially says that a fraction of a second after the big bang half the particles went and hid behind copies of themselves and became 'super-symmetric' partners. This theory manages to plug all the wide open holes that the standard model of quantum physics fame fails to fill; gravity, hierarchy and the fact that 75% of the universe is missing.

Supersymmetry, through various complex processes makes gravity explainable by quantum theory, just like the other forces. It also accounts for the large difference in size of the Higgs boson calculated by theory and then by maths (the hierarchy problem). So how do we know we found it? Easy, make a high enough energy reaction and some of the energy will be missing after.

But the critics disagree; 'Ha!' they say, 'If there was such a thing as an exact and opposite partner to every particle in the universe then they would have decayed into a neutron form and now make up about 75% of the mass of the universe, and you'll never be able to prove it because they'd be totally undetectable! Ha!'

It's almost too perfect.