Higgs Data Offers Joy and Pain For Particle Physicists 186
scibri writes "So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson, what's next? Well: 'There's going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,' predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. The data has shored up the standard model, but technicolor is dead and supersymmetry is starting to look pretty ropey now. Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks in the standard theory in the hopes of being the first to find a deeper truth about how the Universe works."
The real takeaway (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict, over the next two years, what's going to come out of this is the following:
Physicists will have poked holes in most all the prevailing Standard Model-compatible theories, and will start talking about the inadequacies of the LHC and how we need a much bigger collider to prove or disprove the existence of those elusive super-partner particles required by supersymmetry.
Re:learning by smashing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an idiotic analogy. This isn't about breaking things, it's about reproducing the kinds of conditions necessary to observe phenomena. Do you feel the same way about dissecting animals to learn about internal structure or heating various substances to get spectral signatures.
If you're going to confirm or throw out a model of subatomic physics you're going to have to use accelerators to produce the conditions where particles can be observed.
Re:Did we really find it? (Score:2, Insightful)
A few corrections:
Higgs -> Two W Bosons -> 4 leptons (electrons or muons)
This is actually H -> ZZ -> 4 leptons [wikipedia.org]
This is how the W boson was studied so accurately at SLAC.
I believe this is also incorrect. The W boson was discovered at Gargamelle and studied at LEP, CERN.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
While disproving the existence of God is effectively impossible - proving it does exist would actually quite simple, provided you had His/Her/Its/Their cooperation. The fact that their is no credible evidence the existence of God suggests that either:
1) It doesn't exist
2) It doesn't desire to prove Its existence, or
3) It's incapable of proving Its existence
Considering we're talking about a being who most claim created the universe and intervenes in peoples life in ways both subtle and miraculous, number (3) seems unlikely - even just having one of his chosen messengers take part in a double-blind psionics test while God read out the cards to them would be enough to give the question serious scientific merit.
Now (2) could very easily be the case, and is in fact perfectly consistent with some faiths. But in that case I would suggest that either It doesn't actually care about our worship, codes of conduct, or the other stuff religions tend to obsess over, or It's a complete jerk: "Yeah, I know it's been a hundred generations or so since I bothered to offer any evidence that I even exist, much less which of the hundreds of continuously-mutating religions I endorse, but you didn't follow the right one so you're getting eternally condemned anyway".
Which leaves (1) as the default assumption. Either God doesn't exist, or It wishes us to be free to conduct our lives as though it does not - in which case spreading the "Good Word", especially through coercion, would seem to run counter to God's will.
Re:Did we really find it? (Score:4, Insightful)
the cosmological constant, is now the most popular theory to explain the universe's accelerating expansion
describe, not explain