A Higgs Question

Here is some science on the subject.
But this is much more interesting. ... and biologists wouldn't?!

That's a pretty neat simulation, thanks for sharing! Obviously it's a big oversimplification, but it definitely gets some of the flavor across.

I don't know squat about particle physics, but my brother is doing his doctorate degree in Caltech on string theory, so he may know something.Anyway, you would have to be crazy to NOT be interested.
The high energy run is in may right?

That sounds about right, but I honestly haven't been following the detailed schedule recently since I always was expecting it to continue to slip a bit more. If it really does start in May then that's quite soon. It will be very exciting whenever it does happen.Just don't expect discoveries to pop out of it immediately. Unless they get really lucky, it won't be trivial for them to understand their detectors well enough to sort out the small number of discovery collisions from the quadrillions of uninteresting collisions. And even when they have ironed out most of the inevitable bugs, most likely whatever new physics is being produced will look just like some much more numerous conventional process, and the only way to distinguish the two will be through complicated statistical techniques after building up an enormous quantity of data.

You're right, that sounds much more like the science I know.It's amazing to me that there hasn't been more interest in this among the general public, even if you don't know anything about physics (like me),

It definitely is exciting, but it's also disappointing that we've fallen so far short of where we thought we would be 20 years ago in terms of attainable collision energies. And given the massive budget cuts that have gone through the US and Britain for R&D on the next proposed collider (the international linear collider), I sort of suspect that the LHC will be the last of its kind. I really hope the LHC turns up something phenomenal, because if it doesn't the golden age of fundamental physics discoveries may well be behind us.

You could be right. Frtunately, the chances of some new and exciting physics coming out of the LHC are very high.

I wish I shared your optimism. Maybe the LHC will discover something amazing and all will be well. But let's look at the history of some of the past colliders . -I would argue that the last truly unexpected discoveries at particle colliders were the tau lepton (1976) and the charm quark (1974), on the SPEAR accelerator in Stanford.
-In 1977 the bottom quark was discovered at Fermilab. I guess this was also pretty amazing, but it was sort of expected because of the tau.
-The Super Proton Synchrotron: 1981-1984, Collision energy ~400 gigavolts. It was expected to discover the W and Z bosons, and everyone hoped it would also find the top quark or something more exotic. It discovered the W and Z bosons exactly where they were predicted to be but nothing unexpected.
-Large Electron Positron Collider: 1989-2000. Was expected to make very precise measurements of existing particles in hopes of finding disagreement with the standard model, but agreement held perfectly. Also hoped to discover the higgs, but did not.
-PEP-II: 1999-2008. Was expected to make very precise measurements of existing particles in hopes of finding disagreement with the standard model, but agreement has held perfectly.
-The Tevatron: 1987-2009?, collision energy ~2 terravolts. Currently the world's most powerful accelerator. It was expected to discover the top quark, and everyone had high hopes that it would also discover the higgs, supersymmetry, or something even more exotic. All it has come up with is the top quark, though the higgs *may* still be within reach before the collider shuts down in 2009.
-The Super Conducting Super Collider, collision energy ~40 terravolts. Canceled in 1993 in the middle of construction. RIP.
-The LHC: 2008?-?, collision energy ~14 terravolts. It is expected to discover the higgs, and people hope it may also demonstrate something exotic like supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or mini black holes.If the LHC discovers more than just the higgs it would surely be the most important discovery since the charm and tau discoveries in the 1970s. There is good reason to hope, but that hope did not pan out for the last several accelerators, even though two of them (the Super Proton Synchroton and the Tevatron) caused similar monumental increases in collision energy.Edited by fgarb, : Adding note on the SSC

There are good reasons to have higher hopes this time around. The Standar Model, by itself, isn't an stable theory, and naturalness arguments place any new "stabilizing physics" within the LHC reach. Also, precision measurements of rare flavor-changing decays and muon's anomalous magnetic momentum (to cite two) are starting to show some cracks in the Standard Model. Of course, this new physics might turn out to be simply the "boring" Minimal Supersymmetric Standar Model, but even that would be very exciting news. I agree that the worst case scenario would be the discovery of the higgs and nothing else. But that doesn't seem like a very likely outcome.