Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum It's a Matter of Time

I think the questions brought up here are ones where we can definitively say "we don't yet know." There is an impatience in finding the solution that I feel too. But realistically it may be hundreds or thousands of years before we get to the bottom of the pile.

Here, for example, is one answer worth considering (and yes it is rather techie).

S. L. Glashow, has suggested that the laws of physics need not be invariant under the full Lorentz group but rather under a SIM(2) subgroup, whose Lie algebra contains the four generators T1 = Kx + Jy , T2 = Ky − Jx , Jz , and Kz , a situation they called "Very Special Relativity" (VSR). Terms in the Lagrangian that are invariant only under this subgroup necessarily break discrete symmetries, including CP. Unlike most other subgroups, many elementary aspects of special relativity, including particle propagation, are preserved under SIM(2). The theory embodies a new mechanism for neutrino mass which conserves lepton number without introducing additional sterile states. Application to the S U (2)L ? U (1) gauge symmetry of the standard mo del may give the electron an electric dipole moment detectable in future experiments, and lead to observable effects in the end-of-spectrum behavior in tritium β -decay. Our concern is the construction of supersymmetric field theories that are translation and SIM(2) invariant, but not Lorentz invariant. We show that the spacetime symmetry of any conventional N = 1 SUSY gauge theory can be truncated to SIM(2) by including the characteristic SIM(2) conserving but Lorentz violating couplings for the fermions of chiral multiplets. Such theories have two conserved supercharges whose parameters are constant Majorana spinors which satisfy γ? n? ǫ = 0, where n? = (1, 0, 0, 1) specifies the null ray fixed by the SIM(2) subgroup.1

Do I understand it? A bit. Certainly not as much as I would wish. But my point in posting it was to show that this is the world in which these ideas are discussed. And only a handful of people on the planet are truly qualified to do more than marvel at it.