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New discovery at Tevatron

A new discovery was announced today at the Tevatron. "This is amazing," The Quantum Particle Stringy Thingy Blog said, "since the Tevatron has been shut down for some time now." But the most amazing fact was the nature of the discovery: "We've seen all kinds of things come out of proton-proton collisions, but this is the first time we've ever seen --- a frog." The blog goes on to describe the time delay from collision (presumably before the accelerator was shut down) to detection of the frog: "Our detector simply isn't set up to detect something so massive and stable. It wasn't till after the shutdown that we were able to fully examine the detector and find the frog." Of course, acceptance of the result will have to await confirmation from the other major detector. (The blog declined to state which detector the frog had been found in. An official announcement of the result is expected any day now.)

The response from the theoretical community was immediate: Within an hour, 17 papers appeared at ar14.org proposing explanations for the result. Paul Ginsparg was at a loss to explain this phenomenon, since new papers are posted there only once every 24 hours. Although there was a wide range of theories offered, the consensus seemed to be that it had something to do with string theory, or extra dimensions larger than the size of a frog. One alternative hypothesis was the Multiverse, that the frog was created in an alternate Universe where the Tevatron has not been shut down. Another idea was that the frog was the result of an intermediate neutrino state: Since neutrinos are now thought to travel faster than light, they could have traveled into the future to create the frog.

The blog denied that this was a ploy for more funding, since the life of the Tevatron has already ended. A more detailed analysis will have to be made at the Large Hadron Collider, as soon as it is shut down.

Search for new proposals in high energy

String theory has gone a long way since its invention almost a half century ago.

The most recent development was the discovery that the gauge/string duality of the L(orentz) symmetry of AdS₅ on the one hand with the R(olentz) symmetry of S⁵ on the other implies the Yangyin symmetry of N=4 super Yang-Mills.

But there has been relative stagnation in even this approach¹ (in spite of the paper's² huge number of cetaceans) for more than a decade, greater than that of the dark gauges intermediating classical & modern physics. This has led some string theorists to wander off in different directions: nonrelativistic gravity, massive gravity, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, the application of astrophysics to finance ("Big Bank theory"), etc.

A similar stagnation has haunted particle physics since soon after the invention of The Standard Model, magnified recently by the failure to observe the Higgs, or "God Damn particle", & its supersymmetric partner, the shiggsa.

Now physicists have turned to even more novel ways to bring new life into the field, from identifying the Higgs with a bound state of the towel lepton and its antiparticle, to replacing the Dirac spinor with the purely imaginary Marijuana spinor.

Only time will tell whether any of these ideas will bring new life to high energy physics; as they say, "The details are disgustin' appendices."

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¹As exemplified in the recent letter:

Dear AdS,

"I like you, but not in that way"

My sincerest topology...

            Yours truly, CFT

²Capt. Ahab, Stress makes you tensor.