Higgs discovery likely at LHC says Weinberg

Various : In a talk entitled Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us , given to science writers attending the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual symposium, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin gave his opinion of what the LHC will discover.The LHC will eventually attain sufficient energy to produce the Higgs boson, he says, but evidence of supersymmetry is a much more speculative possibility."If the Congress had not had the imbecility to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider [in 1993], it would have been discovered long ago here in Texas,” says Weinberg in comments reported by Tom Siegfried of Science News ."Many of us are terrified that the LHC will discover a Higgs particle and nothing more,” Weinberg said. That would just confirm the standard model, which everybody believes already. It would not point the way to further progress in solving a deeper problem that physics faces—how to add gravity to the unified theory of the other forces. Peter Woit of " Not Even Wrong ” says that what he found interesting about Weinberg’s talk was that, “whatever Weinberg’s views on more speculative theories in physics such as extra dimensions or string theory landscape, he decided not to mention these at all in his talk.""As a result, both questioners wanted to ask Weinberg about string theory, which he hadn’t talked about, not about the solid science he did talk about,” says Woit. String theory or superstring theory , is one of the candidates for unifying all the forces in the universe into one theory.If the LHC creates new particles generated by supersymmetry , then clues to what makes up the bulk of dark matter in the universe would be found, which may give some tangible evidence to whether string theory is correct.But string theory to this point has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence. Weinberg said:

“It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress... I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think that supersymmetry is the most likely place to look.""One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work... I mean I couldn’t say that it was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect.""I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because... I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics... and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enoughâ¦"