I bet the author would be more excited if CERN found a large hadron ;-)
I figured I would have to explain this. He said he would be more excited about something that the standard model didn't predict. Large hadrons don't exist as far as we know.... So it's a play on the name Large Hadron Collider (the collider is large, not the hadrons).
I think understanding the universe is exciting, but only once we start applying it.
Serious people, where is my hover board?
3 years away, right? :-)
Which means its in development now. Im excited.
I have to agree with him. We gain a slightly deeper conceptual understanding of the Universe, but we're in essence replacing one constant with another. Like he said, instead of asking why particles have different masses, now we ask why particles interact differently with the Higgs field to produce mass. Why is there mass? Because of the Higgs field. Why does the Higgs field lead to different masses? Who knows. Maybe if scientists had spent more time on that issue than on string theory and dark matters, we would have many more predictions to test today.
This is akin to saying evolution through survival of the fittest was not a big deal because it just shifts the question to how speciation occurs...