Are some theorists already starting on non-Higgs theories for how things work?
For sure. There have been ideas about so-called “Higgsless” theories around for some time. Most of these theories don’t work for some reason or another. They run into some problem with the data taken with previous accelerators. There are perhaps one or two variants of those ideas which are not in serious conflict with previous data. It’s actually pretty difficult to come up with a theory that doesn’t have a Higgs in it. Q: We’ve slipped into this concept of supersymmetry – I wonder if you have a stock explanation for how supersymmetry figures into the frontier of particle physics. A: Supersymmetry is an idea according to which in parallel to the particles that were made of, the electron for example, that goes around an atom, or the photon, which causes light, in parallel to those particles there would be other particles, call it the selectron, call it the photino, which have identical interactions. So, the selectron, for example, would have an electric charge, and it would couple to th
