LHC starting up again

[AFTT47]

That's very interesting. The skeptic in me (from a layman's perspective) wonders if it's more likely that there is a fifth fundamental force of nature or that our understanding of the gravitational force is very lacking. I mean, we already wonder why it is so incredibly weak and speculate about it spilling into other dimensions. Plus, we can't unify it with other forces. I wonder if our understanding of it is fundamentally incomplete.

I'm in the fundamentally incomplete camp. Adding one more force carrier similar to the Z boson to the standard model is a relatively trivial undertaking theory-wise, compared to quantizing gravity which is super hard. Even leading string theorists I know think that strings are not the final word.

By the way, strictly speaking we already have a fifth fundamental force, which is produced by the exchange of Higgs bosons. The difference is just that it is produced by a spinless carrier, but it's a perfectly cromulent force...

Wow, on the Higgs force. I never thought about it that way but I guess so...

I find my ego somewhat stroked by an expert agreeing with me about my feeling about the gravitational force. The whole dark matter/dark energy thing just reeks of the ether of the 19th century. I'm not qualified to weigh in on it and I recognize that but it registers on my BS detector, you know? It just has that familiar ring to it.

This is an exciting time in physics. How many times have we heard that we're on the threshold of understanding the whole thing? Those who came before us were great but they just didn't have the knowledge to understand. NOW, we really do have what we need and are REALLY on the cusp of total understanding. Right. This  dark matter/dark energy stuff sounds like we're right back to those early humans sitting around a camp fire, looking up and trying to make sense of it all.