Happy 5th Higgs Day!

[Alex K]

Also, parts of the LHC were delivered using helicopters, and we all know that that don't fly.

Gravity is a real rock crusher for sure.

Vertical, too....

I know this is an odd question, but is there any odd outcome of a LHC experiment that could hypothesised now in a sensible way to take particle physics in a completely new direction?

Well... some of my work dealt with small additional dimensions of space, and how to detect them at the LHC via the resonances that occur in such dimensions. That kind of Thing has been analyzed by a lot of people, and would be quite the revolution if it were discovered.

And why is it such a big problem that the standard model still seems robust, just because physicists know it's incomplete?

Before the Higgs boson was discovered, it was relatively obvious that the Standard model without it would be inconsistent, and something had to exist in a certain energy range to fix this inconsistency, either the Higgs boson or something else doing ist job. Then the Higgs boson was discovered. Now, we 1. don't know how neutrinos get their mass 2. what dark matter is made of 3. why the higgs boson is relatively light 4. why there is matter and no antimatter left in the universe. Unlike before, where the mathematical inconsistency of our model was "forcing" nature to have the answers up its sleeve in the range of our experiments, we now have no hard mathematical inconsistency that tells us that yep, these new questions can definitely be answered doing this or that experiment. It's kind of like knowing there is a new continent out there in the ocean and sailing out into the unknown, but you don't know how big the ocean is. Whereas with the Higgs boson, we knew there has to be land in reach.

I admit I find physics fascinating, but I really struggle to understand the difficult stuff at all.

It's difficult for everyone...