That’s the admitted position of David Kaplan and Savas Dimopoulos, two of the leading physics theorists supporting SUSY. SUSY was precisely predicting a Higgs boson mass of 115 GeV, or a much lower mass than the actual one. That’s because the Higgs boson coming at 125 to 126 GeV has proven supersymmetry (SUSY) wrong. They may actually be pulling away from both simultaneously. Ideas about low-lying, easily found supersymmetry were marginal losers the general idea of SUSY and its impact on the Higgs mass has been a marginal winner the concept of naturalness has lost something, and the multiverse has gained a little.Īs Anna said, SUSY and the multiverse are not really mutually exclusive although the "generic" multiverse explanations indeed favor no SUSY or supersymmetry invisible at realistic colliders. But among the propositions that are on the market, we may usually identify the marginal winners and losers. There are lots of loopholes and conceivable alternatives. None of these results are really conclusive or qualitative. The multiverse is the only concrete enough yet acceptable enough framework to "predict" unnaturally small values of parameters such as the Higgs mass, so the physicists' subjective probability (belief) that "the multiverse is needed" has increased. This seems to imply that Nature doesn't care about our notion of "naturalness" – the lightness of the Higgs boson relatively to some very high energy scales such as the Planck scale is "unnatural". The idea about the multiverse has strengthened because the Higgs is known to be both light and the only new physical phenomenon found at the LHC so far. A value closer to 115 if not 100 GeV could be favored if one wanted to make SUSY models "really simple", at least according to the sociologically prevailing ideas about the simplicity. On the other hand, 125 GeV is higher than what the simplest models of supersymmetry – at least according to most supersymmetry phenomenologists – want to see. It is also below 135 GeV which is where it should be according to the general version of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The value of the mass 125 GeV is in the sub-130-GeV region that favors supersymmetry, or makes it necessary according to some, because the pure Standard Model predicts a catastrophically unstable vacuum for such low Higgs masses. Yes, physics has learned things on both concepts, but only gradually.