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

"Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to…
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally…
"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think.…
"Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?" -Michael Shermer One of the problems with the Standard Model of particle physics is known as the hierarchy problem. If you were to calculate the masses of the…

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.