Daniel Whiteson

But yeah, we haven't seen them so far, and that's too bad.

It would be nicer if the universe was easier on us and had a bunch of discoveries waiting for us just past the threshold, but it didn't play so nicely.

So I have a question.

Maybe it's stupid, but it bothers me.

But before I ask it, could you just catch everybody up in whatever terms you want what the hierarchy problem even is?

Yeah, so the hierarchy problem is one of those puzzles that tells us there's probably something that we're missing.

You know, it's a scenario where our math requires a big coincidence to work.

And in time, there's a coincidence that makes you wonder, like, is there a simpler explanation?

And the hierarchy problem essentially says that the Higgs boson, the thing we discovered like 10 years ago, should be really, really massive.

because if you calculate how massive the Higgs boson should be there you have to add a bunch of terms and then you subtract a bunch of terms and those are really big numbers and because they depend on the Planck scale like really the power of the universe

And it seems very unlikely to add up a bunch of big numbers and then subtract away a bunch of big numbers and have them like almost perfectly cancel out.

So the Higgs mass is really, really light compared to like the Planck scale.

You know, it's like 125 times the mass of a proton.

Whereas the Planck scale is up at like, you know, 10, 15, 20 orders of magnitude higher.

You know, the scale at which like quantum gravity effects turn on.

And so it's weird that the Higgs mass is so small that all these really big numbers somehow cancel out to give you a small number.

And is this also connected to the four fundamental forces, strong, weak, electromagnetism, and then gravity?

Is this the same problem?

Yeah, the same problem.

We seem to live in a universe where, you know, we seem to live in a universe that's where gravity is really, really weak and everything else is much more powerful.