- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
LHC restart: 'We want to break physics'
By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News
As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gears up for its revamped second run, hurling particles together with more energy than ever before, physicists there are impatient. They want this next round of collisions to shake their discipline to its core...
In a sense, one of the shiniest new items in the LHC's armoury for Run Two is the Higgs boson. Now that its existence is confirmed and quantified, it can inform the next round of detection and analysis.
"It's a new door - a new tool that we can use to probe what is beyond the Standard Model," says Dr Andre David, one of the research team working on the CMS experiment.
Dr David is driving me from the CMS site, in France, back down the valley between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva to the main Cern headquarters. This main site, adjacent to the Atlas experiment, sits on the southern side of the LHC's great circle and straddles the Swiss border.
He emphasises that the Higgs is much more than the final item on the Standard Model checklist; there is a great deal still to find out about it. "It's like a new wrench that we still have to work out exactly where to fit."
Prof Shears agrees: "We've only had about a thousand or two of these new particles, to try and understand their nature.
"And although it looks like the Higgs boson that we expect from our theory, there's still a chance that it might have partners that would then tell us that we're not looking at our normal theory at all. We're looking at something deeper and more exotic."
That is the central impatience that is itching all the physicists here: they want to find something that falls completely outside what they expect or understand.
"The data so far has confirmed that our theory is really really good, which is frustrating because we know it's not!" Prof Shears says. "We know it can't explain a lot of the Universe.
"So instead of trying to test the truth of this theory, what we really want to do now is break it - to show where it stops reflecting reality. That's the only way we're going to make progress."
In the canteen at Cern headquarters I meet Dr Steven Goldfarb, a physicist and software developer on the Atlas team. His sentiments are similar.
"We have a fantastic model - that we hate," he chuckles.
"It has stood up to precision measurements for 50 years. We get more and more precise, and it stands up and stands up. But we hate it, because it doesn't explain the universe."
etc...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31162725
Long article, well into 'Theories of Everything' territory.
By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News
As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gears up for its revamped second run, hurling particles together with more energy than ever before, physicists there are impatient. They want this next round of collisions to shake their discipline to its core...
In a sense, one of the shiniest new items in the LHC's armoury for Run Two is the Higgs boson. Now that its existence is confirmed and quantified, it can inform the next round of detection and analysis.
"It's a new door - a new tool that we can use to probe what is beyond the Standard Model," says Dr Andre David, one of the research team working on the CMS experiment.
Dr David is driving me from the CMS site, in France, back down the valley between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva to the main Cern headquarters. This main site, adjacent to the Atlas experiment, sits on the southern side of the LHC's great circle and straddles the Swiss border.
He emphasises that the Higgs is much more than the final item on the Standard Model checklist; there is a great deal still to find out about it. "It's like a new wrench that we still have to work out exactly where to fit."
Prof Shears agrees: "We've only had about a thousand or two of these new particles, to try and understand their nature.
"And although it looks like the Higgs boson that we expect from our theory, there's still a chance that it might have partners that would then tell us that we're not looking at our normal theory at all. We're looking at something deeper and more exotic."
That is the central impatience that is itching all the physicists here: they want to find something that falls completely outside what they expect or understand.
"The data so far has confirmed that our theory is really really good, which is frustrating because we know it's not!" Prof Shears says. "We know it can't explain a lot of the Universe.
"So instead of trying to test the truth of this theory, what we really want to do now is break it - to show where it stops reflecting reality. That's the only way we're going to make progress."
In the canteen at Cern headquarters I meet Dr Steven Goldfarb, a physicist and software developer on the Atlas team. His sentiments are similar.
"We have a fantastic model - that we hate," he chuckles.
"It has stood up to precision measurements for 50 years. We get more and more precise, and it stands up and stands up. But we hate it, because it doesn't explain the universe."
etc...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31162725
Long article, well into 'Theories of Everything' territory.
Last edited: