The Elegant Universe (25 page)

Are there any other symmetry principles having to do with space, time, and motion that the laws of nature should respect? If you think about this you might come up with one more possibility. The laws of physics should not care about the angle from which you make your observations. For instance, if you perform some experiment and then decide to rotate all of your equipment and do the experiment again, the same laws should apply. This is known as rotational symmetry, and it means that the laws of physics treat all possible orientations on equal footing. It is a symmetry principle that is on par with the previous ones discussed.

Are there others? Have we overlooked any symmetries? You might suggest the gauge symmetries associated with the nongravitational forces, as discussed in Chapter 5. These are certainly symmetries of nature, but they are of a more abstract sort; our focus here is on symmetries that have a direct link to space, time, or motion. With this stipulation, it’s now likely that you can’t think of any other possibilities. In fact, in 1967 physicists Sidney Coleman and Jeffrey Mandula were able to prove that no other symmetries associated with space, time, or motion could be combined with those just discussed and result in a theory bearing any resemblance to our world.

Subsequently, though, close examination of this theorem, based on insights of a number of physicists revealed precisely one subtle loophole: The Coleman-Mandula result did not exploit fully symmetries sensitive to something known as spin.

Spin

An elementary particle such as an electron can orbit an atomic nucleus in somewhat the same way that the earth orbits the sun. But, in the traditional point-particle description of an electron, it would appear that there is no analog of the earth’s spinning around on its axis. When any object spins, points on the axis of rotation itself—like the central point of a spinning Frisbee—do not move. If something is truly pointlike, though, it has no “other points” that lie off of any purported spin axis. And so it would appear that there simply is no notion of a point object spinning. Many years ago, such reasoning fell prey to yet another quantum-mechanical surprise.

In 1925, the Dutch physicists George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit realized that a wealth of puzzling data having to do with properties of light emitted and absorbed by atoms could be explained if electrons were assumed to have very particular magnetic properties. Some hundred years earlier, the Frenchman André-Marie Ampère had shown that magnetism arises from the motion of electric charge. Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit followed this lead and found that only one specific sort of electron motion could give rise to the magnetic properties suggested by the data: rotational motion—that is, spin. And so, contrary to classical expectations, Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit proclaimed that, somewhat like the earth, electrons both revolve and rotate.

Did Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit literally mean that the electron is spinning? Yes and no. What their work really showed is that there is a quantum-mechanical notion of spin that is somewhat akin to the usual image but inherently quantum mechanical in nature. It’s one of those properties of the microscopic world that brushes up against classical ideas but injects an experimentally verified quantum twist. For instance, picture a spinning skater. As she pulls her arms in she spins more quickly; as she stretches out her arms she spins more slowly. And sooner or later, depending on how vigorously she threw herself into the spin, she will slow down and stop. Not so for the kind of spin revealed by Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit. According to their work and subsequent studies, every electron in the universe, always and forever, spins at one fixed and never changing rate. The spin of an electron is not a transitory state of motion as for more familiar objects that, for some reason or other, happen to be spinning. Instead, the spin of an electron is an intrinsic property, much like its mass or its electric charge. If an electron were not spinning, it would not be an electron.

Although early work focused on the electron, physicists have subsequently shown that these ideas about spin apply equally well to all of the matter particles that fill out the three families of Table 1.1. This is true down to the last detail: All of the matter particles (and their antimatter partners as well) have spin equal to that of the electron. In the language of the trade, physicists say that matter particles all have “spin-½,” where the value ½ is, roughly speaking, a quantum-mechanical measure of how quickly electrons rotate.2 Moreover, physicists have shown that the nongravitational force carriers—photons, weak gauge bosons, and gluons—also possess an intrinsic spinning characteristic that turns out to be twice that of the matter particles. They all have “spin-1.”

What about gravity? Well, even before string theory, physicists were able to determine what spin the hypothesized graviton must have to be the transmitter of the gravitational force. The answer: twice the spin of photons, weak gauge bosons, and gluons—i.e., “spin-2.”

In the context of string theory, spin—just like mass and force charges—is associated with the pattern of vibration that a string executes. As with point particles, it’s a bit misleading to think of the spin carried by a string as arising from its spinning literally around in space, but this image does give a loose picture to have in mind. By the way, we can now clarify an important issue we encountered earlier. In 1974, when Scherk and Schwarz proclaimed that string theory should be thought of as a quantum theory incorporating the gravitational force, they did so because they had found that strings necessarily have a vibrational pattern in their repertoire that is massless and has spin-2—the hallmark features of the graviton. Where there is a graviton there is also gravity.

With this background on the concept of spin, let’s now turn to the role it plays in revealing the loophole in the Coleman-Mandula result concerning the possible symmetries of nature, mentioned in the preceding section.

Supersymmetry and Superpartners

As we have emphasized, the concept of spin, although superficially akin to the image of a spinning top, differs in substantial ways that are rooted in quantum mechanics. Its discovery in 1925 revealed that there is another kind of rotational motion that simply would not exist in a purely classical universe.

This suggests the following question: just as ordinary rotational motion allows for the symmetry principle of rotational invariance (”physics treats all spatial orientations on an equal footing”), could it be that the more subtle rotational motion associated with spin leads to another possible symmetry of the laws of nature? By 1971 or so, physicists showed that the answer to this question was yes. Although the full story is quite involved, the basic idea is that when spin is considered, there is precisely one more symmetry of the laws of nature that is mathematically possible. It is known as supersymmetry.

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Supersymmetry cannot be associated with a simple and intuitive change in observational vantage point; shifts in time, in spatial location, in angular orientation, and in velocity of motion exhaust these possibilities. But just as spin is “like rotational motion, with a quantum-mechanical twist,” supersymmetry can be associated with a change in observational vantage point in a “quantum-mechanical extension of space and time.” These quotes are especially important, as the last sentence is only meant to give a rough sense of where supersymmetry fits into the larger framework of symmetry principles.4 Nevertheless, although understanding the origin of supersymmetry is rather subtle, we will focus on one of its primary implications—should the laws of nature incorporate its principles—and this is far easier to grasp.

In the early 1970s, physicists realized that if the universe is supersymmetric, the particles of nature must come in pairs whose respective spins differ by half a unit. Such pairs of particles—regardless of whether they are thought of as pointlike (as in the standard model) or as tiny vibrating loops—are called superpartners. Since matter particles have spin-½ while some of the messenger particles have spin-1, supersymmetry appears to result in a pairing—a partnering—of matter and force particles. As such, it seems like a wonderful unifying concept. The problem comes in the details.

By the mid-1970s, when physicists sought to incorporate supersymmetry into the standard model, they found that none of the known particles—those of Tables 1.1 and 1.2—could be superpartners of one another. Instead, detailed theoretical analysis showed that if the universe incorporates supersymmetry, then every known particle must have an as-yet-undiscovered superpartner particle, whose spin is half a unit less than its known counterpart. For instance, there should be a spin-0 partner of the electron; this hypothetical particle has been named the selectron (a contraction of supersymmetric-electron). The same should also be true for the other matter particles, with, for example, the hypothetical spin-0 superpartners of neutrinos and quarks being called sneutrinos and squarks. Similarly, the force particles should have spin-½ superpartners: For photons there should be photinos, for the gluons there should be gluinos, for the W and Z bosons there should be winos and zinos.

On closer inspection, then, supersymmetry seems to be a terribly uneconomical feature; it requires a whole slew of additional particles that wind up doubling the list of fundamental ingredients. Since none of the superpartner particles has ever been detected, you would be justified to take Rabi’s remark from Chapter 1 regarding the discovery of the muon one step further, declare that “nobody ordered supersymmetry,” and summarily reject this symmetry principle. For three reasons, however, many physicists believe strongly that such an out-of-hand dismissal of supersymmetry would be quite premature. Let’s discuss these reasons.

The Case for Supersymmetry: Prior to String Theory

First, from an aesthetic standpoint, physicists find it hard to believe that nature would respect almost, but not quite all of the symmetries that are mathematically possible. Of course, it is possible that an incomplete utilization of symmetry is what actually occurs, but it would be such a shame. It would be as if Bach, after developing numerous intertwining voices to fill out an ingenious pattern of musical symmetry, left out the final, resolving measure.

Second, even within the standard model, a theory that ignores gravity, thorny technical issues that are associated with quantum processes are swiftly solved if the theory is supersymmetric. The basic problem is that every distinct particle species makes its own contribution to the microscopic quantum-mechanical frenzy. Physicists have found that in the bath of this frenzy, certain processes involving particle interactions remain consistent only if numerical parameters in the standard model are fine-tuned—to better than one part in a million billion—to cancel out the most pernicious quantum effects. Such precision is on par with adjusting the launch angle of a bullet fired from an enormously powerful rifle, so that it hits a specified target on the moon with a margin of error no greater than the thickness of an amoeba. Although numerical adjustments of an analogous precision can be made within the standard model, many physicists are quite suspect of a theory that is so delicately constructed that it falls apart if a number on which it depends is changed in the fifteenth digit after the decimal point.5

Supersymmetry changes this drastically because bosons—particles whose spin is a whole number (named after the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose)—and fermions—particles whose spin is half of a whole (odd) number (named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi)—tend to give cancelling quantum-mechanical contributions. Like opposite ends of a seesaw, when the quantum jitters of a boson are positive, those of a fermion tend to be negative, and vice versa. Since supersymmetry ensures that bosons and fermions occur in pairs, substantial cancellations occur from the outset—cancellations that significantly calm some of the frenzied quantum effects. It turns out that the consistency of the supersymmetric standard model—the standard model augmented by all of the superpartner particles—no longer relies upon the uncomfortably delicate numerical adjustments of the ordinary standard model. Although this is a highly technical issue, many particle physicists find that this realization makes supersymmetry very attractive.

The third piece of circumstantial evidence for supersymmetry comes from the notion of grand unification. One of the puzzling features of nature’s four forces is the huge range in their intrinsic strengths. The electromagnetic force has less than 1 percent of the strength of the strong force, the weak force is some thousand times feebler than that, and the gravitational force is some hundred million billion billion billion (10-35) times weaker still. Following the pathbreaking and ultimately Nobel Prize-winning work of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg that established a deep connection between the electromagnetic and weak forces (discussed in Chapter 5), in 1974 Glashow, together with his Harvard colleague Howard Georgi, suggested that an analogous connection might be forged with the strong force. Their work, which proposed a “grand unification” of three of the four forces, differed in one essential way from that of the electroweak theory: Whereas the electromagnetic and weak forces crystallized out of a more symmetric union when the temperature of the universe dropped to about a million billion degrees above absolute zero (1015 Kelvin), Georgi and Glashow showed that the union with the strong force would have been apparent only at a temperature some ten trillion times higher—around ten billion billion billion degrees above absolute zero (1028 Kelvin). From the point of view of energy, this is about a million billion times the mass of the proton, or about four orders of magnitude less than the Planck mass. Georgi and Glashow boldly took theoretical physics into an energy realm many orders of magnitude beyond that which anyone had previously dared explore.

Subsequent work at Harvard by Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Weinberg in 1974 made the potential unity of the nongravitational forces within the grand unified framework even more manifest. As their contribution continues to play an important role in unifying the forces and in assessing the relevance of supersymmetry to the natural world, let’s spend a moment explaining it.