Last week I was in CERN for various meetings. Rather unexpectedly, these included one with Roger Waters in which I totally failed to say “Welcome to the Machine” at the right moment.
There’s physics in them thar hills…
The main business was CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee, followed by Council, and the first meeting of the “European Strategy Group” for particle physics which I mentioned here. As I describe in that article, much attention focusses on whether there is a case for a new big collider, and if so which one?
The LHC has transformed our view of particle physics, partly by discovering the Higgs boson and measuring its properties – especially its mass – and partly by what it has not observed. There were predictions that other new particles would show up at the same time as the Higgs, especially those predicted in an extension of the Standard Model of particle physics called “supersymmetry”. These expectations were not met, and that has led to a few different reactions amongst theorists.
Life and Physics 