At New Scientist (28 August 2011), Lisa Grossman advises, “Don’t panic about the missing Higgs – for now.” The particle that the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider was supposed to find, but didn’t, which may unstring string theory:
The world’s most-wanted particle continues to elude the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. A sign that the elusive Higgs boson doesn’t exist? Not so fast. For now, there are good reasons to assume the Higgs is just hiding.
Like the space aliens, you mean? Adrian Kent of the Perimeter Institute think tank in Canada theorized recently in New Scientist that “Aliens who hide, survive” (08 April 2011). Natural selection may favour quiet aliens, due to competition on a cosmic scale for natural resources:
If so, the universe would be a violent place, and evolutionary selection may favour the inconspicuous—those who lie low on purpose, or who simply lack the skill or ambition to venture forth or advertise their existence.
Alternatively,
There’s another explanation for the Higgs’s absence: it decays into particles we don’t know how to detect, such as dark matter or as yet unknown particles. In that case, the only way to detect the Higgs would be by looking for tiny amounts of missing energy.
Does that mean there is a Large(r) Hadron Collider in Europe’s future? And if that doesn’t work, do we just get over God particle?
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