Hello, Higgs. What now?

CMS 7 TeV + 8 TeV diphoton channel CMS.
Source: Phil Gibbs

So they've found the Higgs. Not that this announcement was much of a surprise today, after lots of rumors had trickled into the blogosphere during the last weeks. A milestone, they will write in the history books, a symphony of global collaboration and combined efford, a triumph of the human mind, it was, finding the particle responsible for the origin of mass, roughly where expected with roughly the properties expected.

Roughly, but not exactly as it seems, apparently they have too few tau/anti-tau decays, and, as we've known for some while, the mass is somewhat heavy.

There are some good summaries here, here and here.

There will follow now years and years of analysis of LHC data and theorizing, thousands of papers and hundreds of cubic meters of coffee will be needed to get a clearer picture. We've learned something - now we can revise our understanding of nature. And in the end, we'll be left with a puzzle, an open question, and a theory that requires higher energies to really test it.

And so, strangely, on this sunny day for high energy particle physics, I feel somewhat blue about the prospects. It's been almost two decades since the last discovery of a particle that we presently believe is elementary, the top quark in 1995, which was the year I finished high school. It's been a long way and an enormous effort to that little bump in the above plot. There isn't so much more we can do with hadron colliders. If we try really hard, we can ramp up the energy a little and improve the luminosity a little. Of course what we want next is a lepton collider like the ILC that will complete the picture that the LHC delivers.

But we have a diminishing return on investment. Not so surprisingly - it's the consequence of our increasingly better understanding that it takes more effort to find something new. And to make that effort of blue sky fundamental research, we need societies who can afford it. There's an economic question here, about the way mankind will develop, it's the question whether or not we'll be able to take care of our survival needs, and still continue to have enough resources to push the boundary of nature's secrets back further.

If I look at the ongoing disaster that the European Union has turned into, and at our inability to fix problems with the global financial system, our inability to help billions of people who live in poverty and who lack health care, our inability to find a global perspective on global problems - and our ignorance for most of this issues too - I am far from certain that we will be able to continue to afford that investment. And if we can't, then we lose a major source of innovation, and we risk getting stuck entirely.

So on this day of triumph for fundamental research, I really hope we do get our act together and manage to address the problems we have in governing a global society, for the sake of science.