Last week, I was asked my expectations about the LHC, and offered my half-assed guess. If you prefer your speculation from people with relevant knowledge of the subject, Sean Carroll weighs in with his oddly-precise guesses.
On a related, less theoretical note, Tomasso Dorigo posted a summary of the constraints on the Higgs boson mass last week, which serves to illustrate why people are so anxious to see it-- given what we know about other particles, it really ought to have been detected by now-- the most likely predicted mass has already been excluded, and they're pushing out toward the edge of the normal uncertainty band.
If the Higgs doesn't turn up at the LHC (Sean gives that one chance in twenty), somebody's going to have some 'splainin' to do.
Physical Science
Comments
# 1 | Ian | August 4, 2008 10:01 AM
Thanks for the link!
# 2 | Uncle Al | August 4, 2008 12:13 PM
No Higgs, no axion, no neutralino... no SUSY. Physics suffers massed sector vacuum isotropy. The vacuum began with a chiral pseudoscalar background. It selected the Weak interaction, sourced asymmetric barygenesis, powered inflation. Its greatly diluted contemporary remnant biased biological homochirality. Einstein's elevator Gedankenexperiment has a testable loophole.
Left and right shoes detect a vacuum left foot. A parity Eotvos experiment contrasts opposite chirality space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 cultured quartz single crystal test masses. Somebody should look.
Massed sector anisotropic vacuum through Noether's theorem relaxes conservation of angular momentum for opposite parity mass distributions. Parity is a non-Noetherian external symmetry. Yummy!
# 3 | Detroitus | August 4, 2008 7:38 PM
Nice post. But you forgot to mention strangelets and black holes and the end of the whole wide world! Are you implying that this isn't a legitimate concern?
=o)