[Originally published on July 2, 2022.] It is easy to imagine how. . . having suddenly discovered it. . . it would be both a blessing, and a curse, for the involved physicists (like yet another "re-discovery", in August of that year). The expectations -- after the popular press dubbed it (incorrectly) the "God Particle" -- were blasted. . . completely off the charts. And people have hounded the discoverers. . . essentially ever since.
In fact, it is a vastly-important validation of many a prior theory's predictions, but in particle physics, as with everything (it seems), it raises far more profound questions, than it answers:
. . .This July 4 marks 10 years since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that imparts mass to all elementary particles. The elusive particle was the last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is our most complete model of the universe.
In early summer of 2012, signs of the Higgs particle were detected in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The LHC is engineered to smash together billions upon billions of protons for the chance at producing the Higgs boson and other particles that are predicted to have been created in the early universe. . . .
Q.: As the Large Hadron Collider gears up for its new “Run 3,” what is hoped for, to discover next?
One very interesting question that Run 3 might give us some first hints on is the self-coupling of the Higgs boson. As the Higgs couples to any massive particle, it can also couple to itself. It is unlikely that there is enough data to make a discovery, but first hints of this coupling would be very exciting to see, and this constitutes a fundamentally different test than what has been done so far. . . .
As any other good physicist, I hope though that we can find a crack in the armor of the Standard Model, which is so far holding up all too well. There are a number of very important observations, for example the nature of dark matter, that cannot be explained using the Standard Model. All of our future studies, from Run 3 starting on July 5 to the very in the future FCC, will give us access to entirely uncharted territory. New phenomena can pop up, and I like to be optimistic. . . .
Perhaps more prosaically, despite the peril our fragile experiment in ordered liberty faces in this tumultuous moment, with the highest court increasingly looking like an overtly -Xian religious governing body. . .
I believe our republic will remain resilient enough to weather this storm. Most of all, because I and many others smarter than I am, will now throw in, shoulder to shoulder -- to peaceably change the things we see. . . as broken -- or "unfinished" to borrow young Amanda Gorman's memorable prose, from the last Inaugural morning, on January 21, 2021.
नमस्ते
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