The Emperor's Last Clothes?

Abstract

We are in the middle of a remarkable paradigm shift in particle physics, a shift of opinion that occurred so slowly that some even try to deny that they changed their minds at all. It concerns a very basic question: can we expect to derive the laws of particle physics from a fundamental theory? The Standard Model of particle physics as well as the 1984 string theory revolution provided ample food for thought about this. The reason this was ignored for so long can be traced back to an old fallacy: a misguided idea about our own importance.

88 pages, Review intended for readers with an education in physics. Preprint Nr. added, some statements corrected, some references added. A short version (about 20 pages) was published in Rept. Prog. Phys. 71:072201,2008. July 2010: Footnote added to correct a remark on nuclear binding

References in corpus (11)

• The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
• Inflationary Cosmology
• Supersymmetric Standard Model Spectra from RCFT orientifolds
• General Analysis of LARGE Volume Scenarios with String Loop Moduli Stabilisation
• The Cosmological Constant and the String Landscape
• Basic results in Vacuum Statistics
• A Universe Without Weak Interactions
• Evidence for the Multiverse in the Standard Model and Beyond
• A Model of Anthropic Reasoning, Addressing the Dark to Ordinary Matter Coincidence
• The Landscape "avant la lettre"
• The fine-tuning problems of particle physics and anthropic mechanisms