The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

by Brian Greene

Negative experimental results would provide much less useful information. The failure to find supersymmetric particles might mean they don’t exist, but it also might mean they are too heavy for even the Large Hadron Collider to produce; the failure to find evidence for extra dimensions might mean they don’t exist, but it also might mean they are too small for our technologies to access; the failure to find microscopic black holes might mean that gravity does not get stronger on short scales, but it also might mean that our accelerators are too weak to burrow deeply enough into the microscopic terrain where the increase in strength is substantial; the failure to find stringy signatures in observations of gravitational waves or the cosmic microwave background radiation might mean string theory is wrong, but it might also mean that the signatures are too meager for current equipment to measure.