The Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era [discussion]

The Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era

by

Gian Francesco Giudice

pdf http://ift.tt/2yOkjYb

If one has to summarise in one word what drove the efforts in physics beyond the Standard Model of the last several decades, the answer is naturalness . (For a non-technical introduction to the naturalness problem and for my views on the subject, see [5, 6].) Like it or not, naturalness has been the leitmotiv that has accompanied and motivated most of the attempts to incorporate the Standard Model into a bigger framework at the weak scale. There are good reasons for that.

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The privilege of experiencing krisis Today the word crisis has a sinister connotation, suggesting an approaching downfall, a moment of difficulty or danger. This is not the original meaning of the word. Crisis comes from the Greek krisis , which means “decisive moment”, “turning point”, and was especially used in a medical context by Hippocrates and Galen as the end of a disease. This is the meaning I will refer to and, to stress the idea, I will use the spelling krisis. Krisis means the opportunity to look at a problem with new eyes; it is a moment of change, a discontinuity between past and future. Krisis does not mean a decline of ideas, but the search for a paradigm change.

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I will refer to the present period of rethinking the directions in particle physics as the post-naturalness era . What are the guiding principles of the post-naturalness era and what are the emerging new paradigms? Of course I have no idea. Today we lack the historical perspective to see through the fog of the present state of healthy confusion. All I can offer are some simple comments (which, most likely, time will show to be wrong) on aspects that could transform the post-naturalness era into a phase of discovery.