Supersymmetry and supergravity.
Supersymmetry and supergravity.
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DOI：
10.1126/science.220.4596.491
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发表时间：
1983-04
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
M. Waldrop
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. Waldrop
宇宙学家的兴趣在很大程度上是实际的。宇宙给他们带来了大量看不见的、或者说“缺失”的质量，这些物质只能通过引力作用在星系中显现出来。由于这个宇宙外质的行为非常像一团相互作用很弱的基本粒子的阴霾，宇宙学家已经准备好招待物理学家可能不得不解释的任何候选粒子。与此同时，物理学家们主要从美学的角度来看待格雷维蒂诺斯、菲蒂诺斯等，认为它们是超对称原理的表现。超对称性最初只是抽象量子场论中的一种练习，现在它展示了一个真正的引力量子理论的前景，并解释了夸克和轻子无穷无尽的扩散。不幸的是，在超对称性被发现近10年后，仍然没有丝毫的经验证据支持它。事实上，在等待加速器实验室的一些意想不到的发现之前，大多数理论家现在相信，宇宙学是检验这一想法的唯一真正的方法。正如纽约科学院执行主任、物理学家海因茨·R·佩格斯所说：“我们已经进入了后加速器物理学时代，整个宇宙的历史成为基础物理学的试验场。”这种对未经检验的抽象的迷恋具有讽刺意味，因为它发生在历史上第一次，物理学家对所有自然力都有了可验证的理论。现在可以实验的每一种现象原则上都是可以理解的。只是没有人感到满意。一方面，有广义相对论，爱因斯坦的引力理论。在这里，引力的概念实际上被几何学所取代：行星、苹果和人在空间和时间中移动，就像他们在一种四维表面上旅行一样；看起来相互吸引的只是路径因该表面的曲率而偏转。那--
The cosmologists' interest is largely practical. The universe has confronted them with a great deal of invisible, or" missing," mass that manifests itself only by its gravitational effects on the galaxies. Because this cosmic ectoplasm behaves very much like a haze of weakly interacting elementary particles, cosmol-ogists are ready to entertain any candidate particles that the physicists might have to account for it. The physicists, meanwhile, see gravi-tinos, photinos, and the like primarily in aesthetic terms, as manifestations of the supersymmetry principle. Originally just an exercisein abstract quantum field theory, supersymmetry now holds out the promise of a true quantum theory of gravity, and an explanation of the endless proliferation of quarks and leptons. Unfortunately, nearly 10 years after the discovery ofsupersymmetry there is still not a scintilla ofempirical evidence for it. Pending some unexpected find at the accelerator laboratories, in fact, most theorists now believe that cosmology offers the only real wayto test the idea. As physicist Heinz R. Pagels, executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, says," We have already entered the era of post-accelerator physics for which the entire history of the uni-verse becomes the proving ground for fundamental physics." This fascination with an untested abstraction is ironic, because it comes at a time when, for the first time in history, physicists have verifiable theories in place for all the forces of nature. Every phenomenon now accessible to experi-ment can in principle be understood. It is just that no one issatisfied. On the one hand, there is general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. Here the concept ofgravitational force is actually banished in favor of geometry: planets, apples, and people move through space and time as if they were traveling on a kind of four-dimensional surface; what appears to be a mutual attraction is only the deflection of paths by a curvature of that surface. The the-