LHC Powers Up To 4 TeV

An anonymous reader writes "Due to a decision made at Chamonix, the LHC will operate with a 4 TeV beam energy in 2012. This will allow them to collect as much data as possible (15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS) before the whole accelerator complex gets shut down for about 20 months to prepare for even higher energies. 'By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,' said CERN's Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. 'Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.'"

Comments

One bit more...

[LeDopore]

From TFS:

'Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.'

I can't help but point out that knowing if the Higgs exists will increase our information about the universe by a maximum of 1 bit. (Knowing its mass and decay modes probably would give us more like a dozen or two bits of information - more than 1 bit but still not much.)

Particle physics is great, and doing it carefully *does* increase our knowledge of the world, but only by the tiniest of margins. Imagine if all those thousands of super-bright minds had been focused on some other task for decades? What kind of magic tech would we have by now? The ratio of opportunity cost to benefit is sky high.