Crisis in Particle Physics Forces a Rethink of What Is 'Natural'

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. For several years, the particle physicists who study nature's fundamental building blocks have been in a textbook Kuhnian crisis. The crisis became undeniable in 2016, when, despite a major upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva still hadn't conjured up any of the new elementary particles that theorists had been expecting for decades.