Supersymmetry and the God Particle

Finished the supersymmetry book before i went out this afternoon. Turned out to be quite readable and pretty interesting. It was certainly more focused than the last couple of books that i've read in this stuff.

It must be a real bitch being one of these 'physics rock-stars'. The one who wrote the supersymmetry book has been holding out for someone to find the "superpartners" or the Higgs boson for years, either of which would likely prove that the world is supersymmetric. (For it to be so, it must be possible to do a bunch of math where fermions and boson have been exchanged and still get the same results.)

Higgs physics is a theory needed by the standard model of particle physics to account for the weight of particles - without it the model only works if particles have no weight! The Higgs field is "mediated" by a particle called the Higgs boson. Supersymmetry incorporates Higgs physics so finding the Higgs boson would probably be enough to validate it. So much hangs on it being found that it has been nick named, "The God Particle". Unfortunately, it's proving to be a little elusive.

Things must have been so much easier when experiment was ahead of theory. Then you could have people like Niels Bohr (or was it Max Planck?) being able to explain valency because he had a dream about electron energies being quantized!

Spent the afternoon wandering around east Toyko (Nezu, Nippori, Asakusa.) Ate Tai-yaki and bought my sister a new yukata. It's not the easiest thing in the world to buy - they are only made for gaijin and i feel a right twat buying one speaking japanese... East Tokyo is so much nicer than over here. Dream, dream, dream.