Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit, or have a good reason not to.
Unnatural is a problem.
The poster child for unnatural is Gravitation. It never played well with others; it is unreasonably weak compared to the other engines and oscillations of the universe — the electromagnetic force and the nuclear force. A tiny magnet can lift a large metal spoon off the ground before the gravity of the entire Earth. No one knows why. (Gravity even speaks a different language – generally smooth geometry – as opposed to noisy quantum probability – which speaks of the origin of other forces.)
Natural means expected, explainable by, duh, natural causes. My hair is white because I am old. That is natural. If it turns bright pink on its own (I think it looks nice), that would be very unnatural and I feel compelled to root around (so to speak) for some reason there.
Today, physicists are forced to confront the “natural problem”, because it has been 10 years since the Higgs boson was discovered, and despite global-scale efforts using large-scale machines. giant machine and master mind, the monster still stubbornly resists naturalization. Like gravity, the Higgs boson is strangely soft. No one knows why.
The tried and true cure for unnaturalness is to find a hidden player that can explain the problem. Say your seesaw refuses to balance; one side always pops up for no apparent reason. Then some intelligent theorists predicted that there was an invisible rock weighing down on one side. Their calculations were so precise that the experimenters only knew where to look. Finally, they confirmed the existence of the rock.
The group breathed a sigh of relief. Cheers and applause. Nobel Prize.
To be natural – obvious – the new must be perfectly balanced; there is no rotation of any dials (or fine-tuning, as physicists call it). Do not like to naturalize new citizens to assimilate with natives or “naturalize” flower bulbs to settle into new conditions. Naturalness in physics means no interference. It’s meant to be accurate to one decimal point gazillion, completely on its own.
Despite the need for such precision, this fix has worked so well in physics, it’s hard to imagine it won’t keep happening. Find the hidden finger on the scale and the symmetry returns, harmony is restored, inconvenient truth disappears. As a bonus, physics grows, expands, takes on new things.
The Higgs boson has raised hopes of a repeat. But no second came. No rocks appear.
To get a aware of what had happened, I called a physicist who was himself somewhat unnatural—a “devil by default,” he called himself. Not just because he’s black, or attended Bronx High School with a 60% dropout rate, or because he plays jazz sax, is heavily influenced by hip hop, and collaborates with the likes of Jaron Lanier (both both are founder scientists of the Universal Hip Hop Museum). He’s also unusual because he’s multilingual in physics itself, able to converse with sometimes hostile sides, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity.
