As a theoretical physicist, S James Gates Jr is used to being patient. In his field, it can take years, and sometimes even decades, to gather enough experimental evidence to prove that a theory is on the right track. The Higgs boson is a good example: as Gates points out, this now-famous particle started out in the 1960s as “a piece of mathematics”, and it took nearly 50 years for its existence to be confirmed.

For Gates, the discovery of the Higgs had personal significance: the long-predicted boson was the first item on his “bucket list” of the physics discoveries he would like to see happen in his lifetime. Furthermore, its detection at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2013 also gave him renewed hope for some of the remaining items on the list. Chief amongst these is the theory of supersymmetry, which predicts that for every fundamental particle we know about, there exists a so-far-undiscovered “superpartner” particle with subtly different properties.

As you’ll hear in this podcast, Gates became interested in supersymmetry in the 1970s, when he stumbled across the then brand-new theory while searching for a PhD thesis topic. He has been fascinated by it ever since, and its principles continue to guide his research at the University of Maryland, where he has been a professor since 1988. But even so, Gates’ conviction that superpartner particles will, eventually, be discovered is tempered with pragmatism about the slow pace of scientific progress, and the knowledge that “if you can’t find evidence for a theory, nobody should believe it”.

Listen to the podcast to learn more about the theory of supersymmetry, Gates’ long involvement with it, and his attitude towards the two other items on his bucket list.