I've heard some astronomers say that looking for dark matter and dark energy might be the modern equivalent of looking for the Ether - i.e., that this mess is the best model that we can come up with indicates that we're running into a major incompleteness of our physics. Given how hard it is to find WIMPs, I wouldn't be surprised if that's true. And if they don't find the Higgs with the LHC - and frankly I'll be surprised if they do - then they'll have an even better indication that something's incomplete. I'm hoping that they'll find something other than the Higgs that they'd never predicted, and that will lead us to a new physics that can explain dark matter and dark energy better than the current paradigm (but again, might hint at yet further incompleteness as the current paradigm of geometric gravity plus quantum matter did).
my prediction is that we are going to see new and radical shifts in our physics. I don't think it's going to happen as soon as the turn the LHC on. I wouldn't be surprised if they get lots of weird data and they just don't understand it for a while. And as always one answer will probably lead to an even bigger mystery. It's a great thing. and as always I'm thinking, so over 90% of the universe is "missing" so to speak and at any one time we are only taking in one billionth of the sensory information available to us. Where exactly does the certainty in life come in?
Yeah, they might need a few test runs before they can do some real ground-breaking physics with the LHC.
And the certainty in life seems to be a matter of "knowing enough." Knowing enough to survive in a tiny niche in a tiny world at some tiny corner of a big (but not huge) galaxy in a huge freaking universe. It's not much, but it works the way it's supposed to...and then some. (Assuming what it's "supposed to" do is limited to survival.) For pure survival we don't even need to be able to do particle physics or astrophysics, but we can.
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And the certainty in life seems to be a matter of "knowing enough." Knowing enough to survive in a tiny niche in a tiny world at some tiny corner of a big (but not huge) galaxy in a huge freaking universe. It's not much, but it works the way it's supposed to...and then some. (Assuming what it's "supposed to" do is limited to survival.) For pure survival we don't even need to be able to do particle physics or astrophysics, but we can.
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