CAN FACEBOOK SOLVE THE BIGGEST MYSTERY IN PHYSICS?

SPARTICLES. If a cheeky opponent were to confront you with this in Scrabble, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had either invented a new word for sequinned tights, or misspelt the name of Kirk Douglas’ most famous role, Spartacus.

First hypothesised over 40 years ago, sparticles are the leading prediction of “supersymmetry” – the most popular contender for the next theory of particle physics – which states that each of the fundamental particles we have discovered so far must have at least one partner sparticle to keep it company. Their existence would solve not just one but several of our biggest mysteries, from the nature of Dark Matter to the mass of the Higgs boson.

Nevertheless, the life of the particle physicist, while not as tough as that of Kirk Douglas’ Thracian slave, often feels like a similar exercise in frustration. Despite the almost perfect elegance of supersymmetry as a mathematical description of the composition of the Universe, we have yet to uncover any definitive experimental evidence that the theory is true. In particular, hopes that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would give us an “I am Sparticles” moment have stubbornly refused to be met.

Now, it’s possible that Facebook might have been the map we needed all along.

THE STORY SO FAR

Since 2008, approximately 7000 physicists have worked at the LHC performing many hundreds of searches for new particles. All of these results show that the so-called Standard Model of particle physics remains the only required explanation of the Universe at its smallest scales, although hints of new physics have arisen only to be dismissed as statistical flukes.

Which should be good news – but there’s a problem. The theoretical framework of the Standard Model was largely complete by the 1970s, but, like many cultural artefacts of the era, certain details are offensive