One Week Countdown

September 10, just one week away, marks the official start date for the Large Hadron Collider. This will mark the start of an adventure as we use the world's most powerful particle accelerator to explore the nature of the smallest, most energetic components of the universe, recreating energies on the scale of the Big Bang.

That September 10 date can be misleading, however. The various detectors inside the LHC have been detecting cosmic rays for several months and have already detected the first particles from events inside the LHC itself, as part of the synchronization tests.

Laying aside the various doomsday scenarios, which fail to carry weight in court and will likely fail to carry any wait experimentally, what do we expect to find with the LHC? Well, scientists are hoping to actually observe the elusive Higgs boson, which is predicted by the Standard Model of quantum physics.

One excellent question is posed by high school student and science blogger Alex Reichenbach. While I give credit where credit is do for posing the question, young Alex jumps around a bit disjointedly and never satisfactorily answers the question.

What will happen if the Large Hadron Collider fails to detect the Higgs boson? Do you think that a scientific revolution would be imminent? Does failure to detect the Higgs result in throwing out the Standard Model in favor of ... something else? And, if so, what else?