Congrats, CERN

[prog]

My hat is off to the scientists at CERN and all their supporters. I'm looking forward now to some sweet smashings and amazing revelations. (And hopes that the science press won't mangle things too badly as they abstract the findings down to the level I can understand them.)

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Apart from the Higgs boson, which is the last missing particle in the Standard Model there is a whole cloud of theories involving extra dimensions that make predictions for new physics at around the LHC energy.

Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" is an excellent look at some of the background to the new physics the LHC might discover if we're lucky.

The Higgs itself at this point is almost a non-event, because there is so much in electro-weak physics that is consistent with it being in the expected mass range. It would be a shock if it didn't exist, or if it has exotic properties, but to an extent the LHC is "dotting the i's" on the Standard Model, which of course we need to do, but which isn't as exciting as the possibility of finding something new.

This is a wonderful day. By this time next year we may be all looking back and saying, "Remember when we thought the universe had only one time and three space dimensions?" And even if we aren't, there is a truly excellent chance we'll know the mass of the Higgs, and the Standard Model will be essentially complete, bringing modern particle physics to the same kind of conclusion that chemistry came to when the periodic table was finally filled out.