A lot of the stuff that most of the community work on tend to be rather speculative and as such, should not be presented as facts but rather as mathematically consistent possibilities that exist under certain assumptions, implicit or otherwise. There is also the inevitable theoretical prejudices, or more euphemistically, philosophical leanings, that, in various degrees, underlie all our work. Take for instance, the faith that some of us, myself included, have in lex parsimoniae: Natura nihil agit frustra et nihil facit supervacaneum (law of parsimony: Nature does nothing in vain and creates nothing superfluous). Granted that historically, we have usually found that Nature does, in some sense, adopt a minimalist approach but that certainly does not guarantee that it will always be so or more immediately, that it is so for physics beyond the Standard Model. Even if it does, it might not be in the manner we have traditionally understood what is meant to be simple and elegant. One can probably go on and write a lengthy discourse on all sorts of caveats but in the interest of brevity, I shall not detain you much further. More than anything, it is imperative to keep an open mind. That is not to say that every theory out there is possibly a legitimate candidate. Nature, being the ultimate arbiter, has already ruled out many theories and will continue to do so through the endeavours of high-energy experimentalists.

The fermionic spin-3/2 supersymmetric partner of the graviton. In realistic models, the gravitino "absorbs" the goldstino through what is known as the super-Higgs mechanism and becomes a massive spin-3/2 particle. Within the conventional framework of low-energy supersymmetry, the gravitino is often the lightest supersymmetric particle.

Supergravity is essentially the gauged version of global supersymmetry. In the process of gauging the diffeomorphism invariance, additional particles such as the graviton and gravitino are introduced as in all gauging of symmetries. The auxilliary structure of supergravity theories are often complicated and especially so if one is interested in a superfield embedding.

Supersymmetry is the symmetry that relates a boson (integer-spin particle) with a fermion (half-integer-spin particle). Their couplings to various other fields and to themselves are also related by supersymmetry. As is clear from the lack of experimental evidence of say a bosonic particle having all the properties of an electron except that it has zero spin, called a selectron, supersymmetry must therefore be "broken". And this selectron could then acquire large mass corrections which prevents us from finding it thus far. It is hoped that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which begins operation in 2007 would provide us with evidence of these supersymmetric particles.