From the Economist: nice update on what to build and where for the next big particle collider. Small amount of politics, but otherwise, didn't know where to put it.
Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
I instinctively don't trust such results. Science can never be sure that the duck is actually a duck. It didn't bother me that much when I worked in materials science, because regardless of what really was inside studied samples (which rarely had much to do with the simplistic theoretical models), we wanted stable and repeatable experimental results. It didn't matter if it was a dog if he/she had enough quacking talent. Similarly, all we know about the LHC quacks is that they were heard at certain frequencies - it could have been strangely sounding rhino's farts. But what really bug me is that they had been desperately listening at those frequencies for almost 10(?) years - the 5 sigma confidence doesn't account for the involved bias, especially that - as far as we can tell - they stopped listening once they achieved the result.The recently discovered resonance at 125 GeV has properties remarkably close to those of the Standard Model Higgs boson. We perform model-independent fits of all presently available data. The non- standard best-fits found in our previous analyses remain favored with respect to the SM fit, mainly but not only because the {\gamma}{\gamma} rate remains above the SM prediction.
How cool! It made me google his obituary, which saidI saw Willis Lamb speaking there! The Great Old Ones...
@katastrofa: Get Well!"His fondest life memories were two -- his years at New College, Oxford University, and his summer trips to the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, a gathering of Nobel laureates and talented young students held annually at Lindau on Lake Constance. We were planning to attend the Lindau meeting this summer," Mrs. Lamb said.
Physics is full of bugs. QM is like applied linear algebra AFAIR and doesn't get you very far.He was very critical of modern quantum mechanics.
Ethical vegans respect bugs.The world is full of bugs.