Abstract: "The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest and most complicated scientific device ever built. It smashes together high energy protons in order to create new forms of matter. The accelerator has been running well and the detectors have accumulated vast amounts of data. There are now hints of the long sought after Higgs Boson. I will attempt to explain what this possible discovery means for our understanding of nature at the smallest distances and what challenges it presents for theoretical physics."
This is an hour and a half talk, published to the net yesterday.
It looks as if the standard model of particle physics is being confirmed by this huge and hugely expensive experiment, although theorists would have more fun were it to be rejected. Farhi points out that there may be significant advances to be made in understanding why the parameters of the standard model have the values that they do, and of course, we need to understand the dark energy and dark matter which make up something like 96 percent of the universe (scientists think).
I post this because it helped me a lot to understand the experiment to find the Higgs Boson (or decide it can not be found).
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