Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

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When the LHC was built - one of the biggest reasons used to justify its massive cost was that it would lead to new physics. Th Higgs sighting is sort of the Good News/Bad News scenario.

At the energies predicted, it falls in nicely with mostly established physics (Standard model). So yes that is the good news part.

The seriously bad news part is that it does not lead us in any new directions at all. Theoretical Physicists usually feed off of Observations from experiments like the LHC and new strange results to expand their frontiers.

For a while now unfortunately they have been going down the Warren of String theory without any falsifiable predictions emerging. Instead people have more or less stumbled in the Anthropic principle as the new be-all and end-all. I was really hoping that there was no Higgs to be found at all OR Super symmetry to be found OR Fine structure constant Variations OR some clue abut dark matter :(

I'm not an expert, but knowing the actual value of the Higgs boson mass has implications for other parts of the model. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3343321

I'm not familiar with the topic, but isn't there still room for new discoveries?

Yes certainly there is much room to find new and exciting stuff - but "not" finding the Higgs was the lowest hanging fruit. If the LHC were not able to find the Higgs at any energy level, the Standard model wold be rendered incomplete and a lot of "new" new Physics would follow. They would have had to explian how Mass is introduced into the model without relying on the Higgs Field.

Now (if this is confirmed to the 5 sigma needed) the experimenters have to actually go looking for new stuff - a harder proposition, fraught with interpretations and Agendas.

New for the sake of "new" doesn't make much sense to me. Quoting Einstein "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." If indeed Higgs boson is spotted, it will be indeed a exemplary triumph of this thought, since the core premise of standard model is symmetry and simplicity.

I consider LHC as the best microscope we humans ever build. Our exploratory quest and adventure will remain ever more interesting and baffling when we start to probe in higher energy levels. This will be irrespective of whether the presence of Higgs boson is established or not. And there is no reason to think otherwise, since in the past the deeper and in finer scales we probed, strange phenomena had popped out, requiring more new theorems and scientific understanding to explain them.

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