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"Not a whole lot to show" from the LHC? We got the Higgs Boson, and piles of data providing more accurate measurements of fundamental constants in the Standard Model, along with a ton of progress in various "applied" areas related to developing the materials/tools for constructing the thing.

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The possibility of Higgs appearing at LHC, but not any supersymetry partners, has a name among physicists: the nightmare scenario. The Higgs discovery (measuring its mass) wasn't unexpected, there were known symmetries and energy bounds that made it pretty much have to be there. Everything new LHC was supposed to discover has not appeared. That's not to say there's not good science happening there -- but many people (physicists) consider it disappointing. The purpose of building a collider that big and expensive is to find new particles.

> The purpose of building a collider that big and expensive is to find new particles.

This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.

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