On the Edge of Discovery By Stephen Barr

As many of you know, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) turned on yesterday in Geneva. So maybe I should say a little about it, since this is the kind of physics I do for a living. The LHC is a very big deal for physics. It is likely to make the first major breakthrough in particle physics in over thirty years.

Since the LHC hasn’t discovered anything yet, how can we know it will? Well, we can’t know, of course. But there are strong reasons to expect it will see something important.

Some people say that the LHC will discover something called the Higgs particle. It almost surely will, but if that is all it discovers, it will be a huge disappointment and in fact a disaster for physics. It is (almost) certain that the Higgs particle is there. That in itself is no big deal. The big deal has to do with a deep puzzle connected to the Higgs, which I will now attempt to explain in a non-technical way.

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