A much more interesting possibility is that the Higgs is on this threshold for a non-anthropic reason.
A 2009 paper correctly predicted the Higgs mass by assuming that the standard model plus gravity has the property of “asymptotic safety”, a technical property of the “renormalization group flow” which would have implications for the values of coupling constants at the Planck scale. Asymptotic safety apparently contradicts black hole thermodynamics and may simply be a wrong hypothesis about the mathematical properties of the theory, but there may be other ways to motivate the argument.
Another ingredient of the argument is the existence of a “grand desert” between the weak scale and the Planck scale: no new physics in that range of energies, so that the posited extrapolation of weak-scale Higgs mass from Planck-scale boundary conditions can go through. That runs against the theoretical trend of the past forty years, which posits unification, supersymmetry…
In fact, one of the arguments for new physics at the LHC has been that there must be new particles at the weak scale, in order to stabilize the Higgs mass at that order of magnitude (“hierarchy problem”). Only the Higgs has shown up so far, so if the Higgs can be stabilized by conditions at the Planck scale, but only by supposing this desert of no new physics—that certainly encourages the doubters who never believed in all those increasingly baroque theoretical constructions.
At the same time, we need to explain dark matter and neutrino masses somehow, and the attempt to explain that with new physics below the weak scale looks rather contrived; but maybe that can be accomplished with a new symmetry principle… To me, all those debates, which involve construction of detailed predictive models, seem much more like the future of physics, rather than the anthropic vagueness.
Neutrino masses potentially need no new physics. They fit the SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry of the standard model (they are the only dimension 5 operator that fits the symmetry). If we give up the t’Hooft principal that physical models need to be renormalizable (after all, its not true with GR or the standard model!) then of course neutrinos have mass.
A much more interesting possibility is that the Higgs is on this threshold for a non-anthropic reason.
A 2009 paper correctly predicted the Higgs mass by assuming that the standard model plus gravity has the property of “asymptotic safety”, a technical property of the “renormalization group flow” which would have implications for the values of coupling constants at the Planck scale. Asymptotic safety apparently contradicts black hole thermodynamics and may simply be a wrong hypothesis about the mathematical properties of the theory, but there may be other ways to motivate the argument.
Another ingredient of the argument is the existence of a “grand desert” between the weak scale and the Planck scale: no new physics in that range of energies, so that the posited extrapolation of weak-scale Higgs mass from Planck-scale boundary conditions can go through. That runs against the theoretical trend of the past forty years, which posits unification, supersymmetry…
In fact, one of the arguments for new physics at the LHC has been that there must be new particles at the weak scale, in order to stabilize the Higgs mass at that order of magnitude (“hierarchy problem”). Only the Higgs has shown up so far, so if the Higgs can be stabilized by conditions at the Planck scale, but only by supposing this desert of no new physics—that certainly encourages the doubters who never believed in all those increasingly baroque theoretical constructions.
At the same time, we need to explain dark matter and neutrino masses somehow, and the attempt to explain that with new physics below the weak scale looks rather contrived; but maybe that can be accomplished with a new symmetry principle… To me, all those debates, which involve construction of detailed predictive models, seem much more like the future of physics, rather than the anthropic vagueness.
Neutrino masses potentially need no new physics. They fit the SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry of the standard model (they are the only dimension 5 operator that fits the symmetry). If we give up the t’Hooft principal that physical models need to be renormalizable (after all, its not true with GR or the standard model!) then of course neutrinos have mass.