Next sunday, there is an open day at the Large Hadron Collider. If you are in the proximity of Geneva don't miss the chance to visit that pharaonic work! The main goal of that particle collider is to reveal the Higgs boson, the particle that's supposed to give mass to all other massive particles. Hereby an instructive video:
But what if we discover no Higgs boson? How do we proceed? What are the plans? I guess we'll find plethora of other particles at those unexperimented energies. We'll need to set up new supermodels, supertheories. That will generate decennies, if not centuries of theoretical work and speculations, which will call for Xtra LHC's, and so on.
Before heading enthusiastically towards Xtra LHC's - because an XLHC will not cost billions of dollars, but hundreds of billions of dollars - I vote for a quiet time. Let all theorists and experimentalists take a paid sabbatical year and develop independently their own vision on quantum reality, the simpler the better. Because there are a lot of other mechanisms that make particles gain inertia, especially when you think of particles as having concrete reality, like little rotating needles or hooks or any structured non circular extension. Let us first work out all those alternative paths before taking the XLHC highway, if we'll still be there ;-) Wink at what's awaiting us according to the LHC lawsuit at Honolulu.
Monday, March 31, 2008
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