The Large Hadron Colliderhas been fired up and the planet still exists! They have not started smashing particles yet but even then the planet will still exist. The collider has been designed in the hope of capturing the after image of the Higgs Boson. Which would be a major discovery for the standard model of physics…the scientists involved in the project project having the results once they begin the collisions in 2009.
What I find really interesting is that Stephen Hawking is betting against finding the Higgs boson
“The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle,” Hawking told BBC radio.
“I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won’t find the Higgs,” added Hawking, whose books including “A Brief History of Time” have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.
I think it will be exciting either way… we either learn something fundamental about the universe or we get to go back to the drawing board and come up with new hypothesises to build in to new theories… in either case it is likely that our under standing of the universe and its origins will grow. We are now on the edge of science looking as far in to the past as we can and hoping it will give us a better understanding of today going in to tomorrow.
