It is dishonest to paint the LHC as an $8 billion experiment to discover the Higgs Boson. That is certainly part of it, and currently the issue that particle physicists are most excited about but it is hardly the only physics that will be discovered at the LHC. History has shown us that whenever particle accelerators have been bumped up in energy, we learn something new. Unfortunately it appears that the universe does not always operate in a smooth and differentiable fashion as energy increases, so there are many surprises in store for us.

In any case, there are several other experiments such as ALICE, LHCb and TOTEM which will be occuring at the LHC. The accelerator itself will be run with heavy ion collisions for a month every year, which will allow us to better probe the quark-gluon plasma that is theorized to have existed 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Even if the Higgs is found exactly where it is theorized to be and behaves in the the manner it is theorized to behave, these other experiments would make our money worth it. After all, how much money have we spent doing nothing in Iraq?

To say that particle physics would look bleak if the Higgs is found is also nonsense. There are many things that the Higgs can not explain, such as what particle(s) makes up dark matter. While it is true that the Standard Model does not predict anything that exciting coming out of the LHC energy levels outside of the Higgs, we will not know whether this is true without testing it. We may find something exciting! While the predicted super-symmetric partners of our "regular" particles should not exist at the energy levels seen at the LHC there are a number of reputable scientists who feel that it may be possible to see signatures of these particles at those energy levels. Could they be wrong? Of course! But it will certainly be interesting to determine.

Personally I'm betting that at least one Nobel Prize comes out of the LHC that is completely unrelated to the Higgs. Given what I've learned about the history of science, I expect that the universe has a few surprises in store for us just as the discovery prompted a physicist to exclaim, "Who ordered this?" and I'm interested to see what science will result from the LHC. Perhaps a better understanding of why there are three families (assuming that isn't disproven!) of particles will happen. Or we may better understand the interactions of the quark-gluon plasma. Or maybe we'll discover a dark energy candidate. There are so many possibilities that focusing the whole experiment on the Higgs boson is a slap in the face to the many physicists who are working hard at the other physics available at the LHC.

After all, there will be over 4000 physicists working there and they can't all get credit for the Higgs!

Completely agree.

Yep, its clear that the author took his "Physics for Poets" class a bit too seriously. He seems to think that the LHC is doomed if they see the Higgs, and its doomed if they don't. I'd be curious to hear the justification for the assertion "...the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn't predict are almost negligible." Where does he get that? There's no justification for it in the article.

I think the biggest problem with the article is the assertion that it's a disaster for the Tevatron to see the Higgs before the LHC. There's a lot more to physics than finding particles. First, in order to call it the SM Higgs they need to show that its spinless and the couplings are what they should be. That's hard to do with just a 5 sigma excess. I'm not an expert on this, but if the Tevatron can see this thing, then the LHC will make a ton of them. First comes discovery, then comes the model-building. It seems this would just give the ATLAS & CMS people a head start in knowing where to look.

Lastly, to echo a comment made somewhere else: someone with a Master of Arts in physics commenting on an anonymous posting on the internet? Is this science journalism these days? Really? Yikes.

Unless it'd take too long to say, what are ALICE, LHCb, and TOTEM? I also seem to recall reading that the Large Hadron Collidor is going to somehow aid the development of nuclear fusion as a power source. My field is biology (including the GMTC), so I'm torn between the impulse to dismiss the whole business as trivial and the worry that, actually, it's much more important than anything I'll ever do in science.

It actually is pretty long and involved. But if you're interested here is the list of the experiments from the LHC website:

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I've never heard anyone say that the LHC will aid in the development of nuclear fusion as a power source, but since I pretty much live in the ivory tower it may possibly be that is far too practical a consideration for associates to get excited about.

Thanks, PhysicsGirl, for the thoughtful comments. I wholeheartedly agree that there is a lot planned at the LHC, much of which has nothing to do with the Higgs boson. And yet, the Higgs seems to be at the center of the popular discussion (as I pointed out, with the articles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, in the last month) surrounding the LHC. The reason for this is that many physicists have identified the Higgs as good publicity: a new particle is easy to sink your teeth into; understanding mass generation is pretty easy for non-physicists to identify with. (It's worth noting, however, that although the Higgs gives mass to elementary particles, most mass that we observe directly comes from the potential energy between the quarks that make up hadrons, like protons and neutrons.)

The bad news for the LHC (and for particle physicists in general) has to do with this Higgs rhetoric. If a simple, vanilla, Standard Model Higgs is found, selling future accelerators will be difficult, if only because some new concept will need to be introduced. The cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 shows what can happen when an unsympathetic legislative body (or a public) can't be convinced that basic research is important. Coming up with something new (like further research into the quark gluon plasma, which isn't emphasized in most popular science accounts of the LHC) to convince taxpayers that accelerators are still useful won't be easy.

If something other than the simple, vanilla Higgs is found, then selling future projects is much easier: the theory was wrong, and all sorts of new things, in the same vein as the Higgs, may be found at accessible energies.

One point that I might clarify is that, in some sense, the Standard Model predicts when new physics will be found. Quantum field theories, of which the Standard Model is one, often have terms that go to infinity at finite energy scales. This means that new physics must occur at these scales. The minimal Standard Model, in which the Higgs behaves most simply, doesn't have any of these terms. In this case, it's described as "renormalizable," which means there's no primae facie reason to expect new physics. Of course, we know that near the Planck scale, gravity becomes strong, so something must happen there. But before that, it's difficult to imagine how new physics could enter the picture at all. This is why I conclude that, if the plain old Higgs is found, we're unlikely to find anything beyond it. And I think this would be bad news, since, as you rightly point out, there are many things unexplained by the Standard Model.

On the other hand, if some complicated Higgs-like mechanism is found, it's anyone's guess what the LHC will observe. In fact, many physicists have pointed to the things the SM does not explain as evidence that a simple Higgs mechanism is unlikely. And this may be. It doesn't bear, however, on the possible counterfactual that a simple Higgs mechanism gives little reason to hope for physics beyond the SM.

It's also worth noting that a number of physicists have pointed out that the details of the rumor may rule out a simple Higgs. This would be great.

If photons are particles without mass - it means there is matter out there that does not follow conventional physics.Lets call is SupraPhysics.Thereafter this opens up all possiblities - even the existence of more higher levels of physics, lets call it double SupraPhysics. Therefore it means that there is possibly an entire system out there that just does not follow physics as we know it i.e. something that is eternal, never changing, without the inferior limitations of gross physics. God for instance ? Higgs go smoke some twigs - you may be an atheist - but an atheist by choice and not by proof.

JamesOwenWeatherall: The cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 shows what can happen when an unsympathetic legislative body (or a public) can't be convinced that basic research is important. Coming up with something new (like further research into the quark gluon plasma, which isn't emphasized in most popular science accounts of the LHC) to convince taxpayers that accelerators are still useful won't be easy.

LeRoy: Well, and what you are describing is nothing more (nor less) than the inevitable consequences of the frighteningly high levels of scientific illiteracy in America, which is our Achilles' heel as a nation.