Am I to understand from this article that the LHC is over? That the global community of particle physicists can't come up with anything interesting to do with the world's most powerful particle collider? I do hope I'm misinterpreting the article, because that would be a huge disappointment.
You misunderstand, the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties, they're just not finding any more particles. Finding particles is sexy, and sexy gets funding, so the risk is that they run out of funding with their run of the mill sciencing.
That's why they're postulating, maybe if we had a slightly larger collider we could find sexy super symmetry. The author thinks that is disingenuous because the argument that a slightly larger collider would find supersymmetry is speculation, not based on real science.
Anyway, even if there was a solid argument for there being supersymmetry just around the corner I don't think a larger collider would be funded, the LHC offered many many sexy things, so the stars aligned and it got funded, but would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for supersymmetry? I feel as a layman the idea of supersymmetry is not captivating enough. Not in the way the higgs boson was.
Anyway, there's so much applied physics research just waiting to be done right now, maybe it's time for theoretical physics to chew on it for a bit.
> the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties
I'm glad to learn that I was mistaken! As a layman myself, this is really all I want from the LHC: for it to continue to be a useful piece of equipment for scientific experments. From the article, it sounded like the attitude was, "we didn't find anything sexy, so we're done here," which would be a huge waste.
For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular culture) that are in use today.
They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.
> but would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for supersymmetry?
Maybe not.
What we really need is China to build a massive new supercollider as a national prestige project, to show their parity with the West. That might even spur some competitive spirit and get the West back into the game.
> At the end of 2018, the LHC will have recorded a mere 3% of the intended research program. That means that there is 30x more data to come. I think you'd need to see the results of all of the data before you say that the LHC was a bust. It may be. But your claim is hasty.
That's not the right conclusion. The LHC is expected to run for at least another decade, but it will not cast light on terra incognita forever. Since particle accelerators like the LHC (and its various proposed successors) can take a generation to build and calibrate, it's important to start thinking now about planning and funding future experiments.
No, this article is nonsense. Basically saying because nothing incredibly ground breaking has yet to come out of the LHC that it's a disappointment/failure.
Feels like saying SpaceX has failed because it hasn't put people on Mars yet.
It might be more accurate to say that SpaceX has to frame their ventures in terms of fantastical Mars colonies for PR purposes, while the reality is less sexy, but more necessary LEO work.
I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of SpaceX investors and employees understand how sexy partially-reusable and fully-reusable LEO rockets are.
