Slashdot Mirror
Why the LHC May Mean the End of Experimental Particle Physics
StartsWithABang writes: At the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin famously said, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." He was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight. But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only at the LHC, but at any high-energy particle collider we could build here on Earth. If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.
In the article this: "it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. " is asserted without supporting evidence.
So, StartsWithABang starts by telling us that Lord Kelvin was a fool for thinking there was nothing left to discover and then he goes on to say practically the same thing.
I see.
Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. There just might not be anything left for the LHC to discover.
I suspect even that is false, that there will be all kinds of science to be done with it. But it may be true we don't discover any new particles with it by smashing things together, which is the thing it was built for.
If you wanted to refer to FACET, you could have at least mentioned the name so that others who are curious can look it up, instead of just assuming you're a troll (and those that know about it can still view you as troll/naive because of your awkward wording...). However, everything I said in the previous post still applies. Nothing about the work at SLAC will bring a trivial replacement for LHC in the next decade. In a long time scale it will yield improvements, but they are going to be much more difficult than anything done before. As already said, plasma accelerators still have scaling issues. Just because you can achieve some amazing acceleration gradient doesn't mean you can just carbon copy it ten times and get ten times the energy.