RE: First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)
August 6, 2016 at 4:01 am
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2016 at 4:02 am by Alex K.)
In principle, you should be right... but here's the fear everyone has right now -
Before the Higgs particle was discovered, we knew not only that our understanding of nature was incomplete, but also that new phenomena, be it a Higga boson or something else taking its place, had to appear at the energy range which the LHC could probe - simply because the theory without the Higgs boson breaks down at a point that was within range of experiments, so anything would have been a discovery. This was informally called the "no lose theorem" for the LHC.
Now that they have found something that looks just like the Higgs boson, the theory is mathematically complete.
Now, there are several open questions left, most notably what is dark matter made of, and also, why is there matter but no antimatter. The big question is now - do these phenomena have answers that can be discovered in a man made lab like the LHC or are they so far removed that you'd need a collider the size of the moon to investigate them? There is no guarantee that nature is set up in a way that we can glimpse these things, unlike with the higgs. A new boson would have been a signal - new physical phenomena are indeed accessible to man! It would have cracked the window to these questions wide open. Now, we're back to the place where there might be no new discoveries in the forseeable future.
Before the Higgs particle was discovered, we knew not only that our understanding of nature was incomplete, but also that new phenomena, be it a Higga boson or something else taking its place, had to appear at the energy range which the LHC could probe - simply because the theory without the Higgs boson breaks down at a point that was within range of experiments, so anything would have been a discovery. This was informally called the "no lose theorem" for the LHC.
Now that they have found something that looks just like the Higgs boson, the theory is mathematically complete.
Now, there are several open questions left, most notably what is dark matter made of, and also, why is there matter but no antimatter. The big question is now - do these phenomena have answers that can be discovered in a man made lab like the LHC or are they so far removed that you'd need a collider the size of the moon to investigate them? There is no guarantee that nature is set up in a way that we can glimpse these things, unlike with the higgs. A new boson would have been a signal - new physical phenomena are indeed accessible to man! It would have cracked the window to these questions wide open. Now, we're back to the place where there might be no new discoveries in the forseeable future.
(August 6, 2016 at 12:51 am)SteelCurtain Wrote:(August 5, 2016 at 10:20 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: I don't see how that follows. If a new particle was discovered, science would advance, there's no reason to celebrate that our current understanding appears to be closer to reality, when there's reason to believe it could be even closer.
True, it only appears to be closer. My point is that I don't think it's a blow, it may only be a neutral discovery. This isn't a hindrance to the advancement of science, it just means it won't advance in this particular direction.
It must be a blow to certain physicists who really thought that that original data was more than an anomaly. But I don't think it's a blow to science in general.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition
