Anybody have any thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider?
I’m pretty excited. Plus there seems to be a (very remote) possibility of creating a black hole on Earth! Whoops! Haha… Those crazy physicists, all 2000+ of them.
My spam filter is full of emails saying they can increase the size of my hadron.
Hey, somebody had to say it. 
So that thread helps establish why the collider is not a very risky thing, now how about how excited?
Will it find the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs? (Exciting. Standard theory is correct. Let’s put money elsewhere than more colliders now.) Not find Higgs at all? (Exciting in the fact that Standard theory is all wrong and some new theories need to be built up damn fast but hard to have to justify all that money to find nothing.) Find Higgs and something else unexpected? (Oooooh. And now we need the next generation of collider to explore that new stuff. And where does it get built?)
Me? I hold onto the thought that space is n-dimensional but that we can only observe that which travels within 4D spacetime directly (other than by gravitational effects) and expect them to find evidience suggesting that there actually is an equal amount of antimatter and matter in the universe, it is just that that mirror immage antimatter is partly poking into other dimensions differently and travelling in it somewhat too, present by gravitational effects and as asymmetric particals. To me that would be bigger than supersymmetry and all that jazz.
My prediction is that when they measure the mass of the Higgs boson it will collapse the planet into an ultradense particle about the size of a pea.
Stupid Type 13 planet~
I’m a bit aroused. Also mauve.
Even if it finds nothing but the Higgs (or lack thereof), it’ll have easily paid for itself. Plus, it’ll certainly give us a much better understanding of the Weak Force. But there are a whole bunch of other things we expect might be up in that energy range, too, any of which would also be quite exciting. We might start finding some of the hypothetical supersymmetric particles, which might make up the dark matter. We might find whatever else is the dark matter, if it’s not SUSYs. Much more excitingly, we might find microscopic black holes, which would crack the whole quantum gravity question wide open for us. And most excitingly of all, we might find completely new things, which we hadn’t even expected.
So, yes, you could say that I’m excited. Afraid, no, though perhaps slightly awestruck.
But what if they find Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa?
It will raise more questions than it answers. A bigger collider will be required to answer the new questions.
Rinse, repeat.