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In SUSY We Trust: What the LHC Is Really Looking For
from New Scientist
... Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the Large Hadron Collider's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle," the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.
... Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century--the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. ... It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.
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