New Revolutions in Particle Physics: The Basic Concepts,

Physics 25

Revolutionary new concepts about elementary particles, space and time, and the structure of matter began to emerge in the mid-1970s. Theory got far ahead of experiment with radical new ideas such as “grand unification” and “supersymmetry,” but the concepts have never been experimentally tested. Now all that is about to change. The LHC — the Large Hadron Collider — has finally been built and is about to confront theory with experiment. The next two quarters of our ongoing physics series with Leonard Susskind will be devoted to these theoretical ideas and how they will be tested.