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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Is this more along the lines of what you wanted - a prediction on finding the Higgs?

"CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims.

Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best."

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Just finished watching Google Tech Talks presentation by Edward Farhi at

"Why Physicists Need the LHC"http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Farhi hopes that something (anything, please!) will be found that is not currently predicted by the Standard Model. Otherwise High-energy particle physics in its current form, accurate to 10 decimal places, will be almost completely explained.

What's wrong with the Standard Model being correct? It would appear that 10 decimal places accuracy is sufficient to indicate a theory correct and complete.

High-energy particle physicists are worried that, should the LHC prove to be a $6B boondoggle contributing little or nothing to knowledge, they will be unable to get future funding and will face future unemployment. Farhi admits he is hedging his bets by doing side research in quantum computing (that's why he's at Google).

I hope the LHC finds nothing new. Then research money could be redirected from high-energy particle physics to more productive areas of physics and the other sciences.

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