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comment by NotAnotherNeil
NotAnotherNeil  ·  3426 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nine theories of the multiverse.

Just to take you up on your comment about the Higgs bosons, what you say is not really correct.

Firstly, as far as I am aware, the mass of the Higgs boson is completely compatible with predictions from the standard model.

Secondly, I don't think string theory has any predictions to make about physics at energy scales being tested by the LHC, and certainly didn't have any concrete predictions for the mass of the Higgs (after all, one of the main problems of string theory is that there are many string theories and we have no idea which is the correct one, if indeed one is correct).

Thirdly saying

    The Standard Model calculated that the Higgs should be at energy level A
is not really true. In the Standard Model, the various parameters (such as "bare" masses of the particles and "bare" interaction strengths) are input parameters which one plugs in by hand; there is no calculation directly of the masses (although one can compute corrections to the "bare" masses due to interaction in terms of the input parameters). What one can do is vary, say, the mass of the Higgs and see if one gets computed quantities compatible with the observation; it doesn't directly "calculate" the mass (sorry if this is a bit pedantic).