Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing

holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."

Comments

Re:Higgs is the GOD particle

[ZombieWomble]

if we find the higgs it makes the standard model more convincing as far as its predictive power but by no means means it is correct. It makes it rather harder to convince governments to fund massive facility budgets though: "We have this theory which has proven almost exactly right in every test we've thrown at it, and now we're out of ideas. Can we have $80 billion to build a system ten times bigger to see if we can just brute force some new phenomena?"

There is a distinct lack of a focus in the near future for particle physics if the Higgs is found and doesn't raise even a little question. All that's left to do is bigger numbers and hoping something will come out of it, which is going to be a damn hard sell.