Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Has the Higgs boson been found?
Slate reports on some fairly serious rumors that scientists working using the Fermilab Tevatron have found the Higgs boson, right where the standard model says it should be. The Tevatron is supposed to close in 2009, and so "as time runs out for America's biggest atom smasher, some nervy experimentalists have jumped the gun."
So why could this be bad news for physics? Two reasons.
[T]he standard model... happens to be clunky, boring, and infuriatingly silent on the Big Questions that the final theory of physics was supposed to answer. Questions like: Why is there something, rather than nothing? And where does gravity fit in? If the standard model turns out to be a complete description of particle behavior, as the discovery of the Higgs would suggest, these questions may never be answered.
Not only that, but it would also mean that a vast-- nay, cosmic-- jump in accelerator power would be necessary to keep particle physics going. How cosmic?
[T]he standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. With current technology, this would mean an accelerator the circumference of the Milky Way....
That's why particle physicists, and the EU member states that have spent Nepal's annual GDP to build this accelerator, are hoping that no one, in Chicago or Switzerland, finds the Higgs. The future of high-energy physics lies with the small chance that the standard model is wrong, and something exotic happens at LHC energies.
Ironically, finding the Higgs boson might profoundly change the way particle physics research is done. For decades, high-energy physics has been driven by a combination of spectacularly big, complex (and expensive) machines, and astoundingly sophisticated theory. If it becomes impracticable to build those machines, then the game changes in a basic way.
Looking a littler closer to home, this could mean that CERN's Large Hadron Collider-- which is going to go operational very soon, and was designed to look for the Higgs boson-- might go down in history as the Maginot Line of Big Science. Though Anthony Townsend, always looking on the bright side, contends that as a computing infrastructure project it was still probably worth it.