Seed on the Large Hadron Collider

My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They've got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people.

Most of the answers are pretty predictable. Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions, Leonard Susskind about the Anthropic Principle, etc. My favorite answer, though, is Steven Weinberg's:

What terrifies theorists is that the LHC may discover nothing beyond the single neutral "Higgs" particle that is required by the standard electroweak theory. With no sign of supersymmetry or technicolor or anything unexpected, we would then have no clue to what happens at the much higher energies where gravitation becomes a strong force. We fervently hope for some complicated discoveries.

I have to say, on a certain level, I'm actually rooting for the "nothing but the Higgs" scenario, just because I like to see theorists squirm.

More like this

So, I was thinking, where are the cold alien intelligences who ought to be out there, studying us dispassionately, as if we were microbes...? Well, what if we accidentally killed them all? No, really.
Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding.
Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter:
LHC Shows the Way workshop: general colloquium reviewing the LHC and the Higgs discovery. Kyle Cramner from NYU: "We discovered the goddamned particle" More slow live blog. Cute opening video of LHC construction.

Not sure that will change your mind but "nothing but Higgs"= "a lot of anthropic reasoning", as the most plausible explanation of the hierarchy between the weak and Planck scales would become environmental selection.