For the cost of 1 month of Iraq War, Europe built the CERN center. What more can you say?

We have a white trash infestation. It's call the Tea party and it feeds on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

Murica is rerarded.

We began building an even better collider in Texas, but the GOP decided, "We don't need no pinhead science in the USA." For the first time since WW2, more American physicists are leaving America for other nations than are coming here. That's scary for America's place in the future.

Sure but how are we going to funnel money to the donors of our political parties by doing science? Kinda misses the point of democracy and capitalism, don't you think? After the takers in the 1% need billions of tax-payer dollars to maintain their lifestyle.

The CERN center will continue to have extensive maintenance costs for years to come and the war subsidizes our economy.

If you're going to strike an argument against our immoral warmongering pattern, you probably shouldn't bring up money; that's our bread and butter. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for the war in the slightest bit.

CERN center doesn't subsidize economy???

And some soldiers who were seriously injured and losing limbs would require life-long healthcare.

The technology that will arise from these discoveries could be astounding, these are the types of exeriements that gave us nuclear energy. Maybe dark matter will be an easily tapped energy source, or a cure for cancer, who knows? Iraq just keeps our combusiton engines going just like 1910.

Awesome! I would like to read more about this on CNN. 1000 years from now, this will be the only thing that will be remembered from this decade.

Thanks @Surge! I will be writing more about it soon!

Regards,
Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Please stop calling the Higgs boson "the God particle," it really cheapens the physics community (and CNN) to keep referring to the most important scientific discovery in decades by a completely inaccurate and almost offensive term the press came up with to lure stupid people into reading scientific articles. Sigh.

The press did not come up with the name, Leon Ledermen (also a physicist of note) did as the title for his book. However, this story would not even be news without the name and if it causes 'stupid' people to read and become interested, in this case, that is good enough for me.

"it causes 'stupid' people to read and become interested" ... Which is good I guess, but it also gets the truely ignorant in a frothy fury that's detrimental to the science going on here. Didn't they delay for a few months over concerns about creation of a singularity (black hole)?

Leon Lederme's publisher did, actually.

You speak as fact an yet have no knowledge.

Great article Elizabeth.

You're hot.

Ms. Landau- it might also be interesting to incorporate Juan Maldacena's and Leonard Susskind's holographic universe theory which has support from the quark-gluon superfluid plasma findings found at the LHC in further articles. Its sounds counter-intuitive, but we might all really exist on a distant 2-D cosmic event horizon in a hologram that seems projected into 3-D space. The simple explanations in Susskind's Black Hole War of this theory could help most people without a PHd in physics understand this exciting new theory. I don't know if the story could be compacted enough so that its a mainstream news media consumable, but its a paradigm shifting theory that could spawn a whole new range of technologies. If you get a chance to read Black Hole War by Susskind, you will never see reality the same way again.

It's always strange what gets remembered about a specific time. The LHC has been around for a while so I'm not sure it would be something they'd specifically remember about this decade. And with human knowledge being digitized remembering things about specific decades is going to be a lot easier. People will type in 2010-2019 and get all kinds of information. You can't look to the future and expect human knowledge to still operate the way it did in the past, it won't. We keep better records of everything now than at any point in history, that means we're leaving more for future generations to study.

People won't be here 1000 years from now. We are polluting the planet and making war over anything and nothing. The human race is working toward its own extinction.

True.

Oh, we've got a lot longer to go than 1000 years. Obviously, some countries' complete disregard for environmental issues (read: China and friends) will reach some sort of ultimatum, but I doubt that it will end in the destruction of human civilization.

It depends on what comes from the knowledge we gain from it. Most likely that will be things that incredibly alter mankind's future, but it may take a while to appreciate it. We may look back on this as the beginnings of FTL. It all depends on how the universe ultimately is put together.

You mean there are nations on this planet that spend billions upon billions of their currency in other things other than war? OMG, I mean, why are we not doing that.

The Higgs Boson walks into a church. The priest says, we don't like your kind to be here. The Boson turned around to leave, stopped at the door and said: "I will leave if you will, but how are you going to hold mass without me?"

Hilarous modern joke! It only works in English, though, but I love it!

If the Superconducting Super Collider hadn't been killed , this story would have taken place in Texas 10 years ago.

unfortunately, texas would have had to import anyone capable of operating it.

Of course. Same goes with the Cern, there are people from all over the world working there. It's an international collaboration, USA included. Globalisation at its best.

And it is all happening in Europe. You can thank Newt Gingrich for torpedoing the American particle physics laboratory. Sh** head.

Nah...Texas would have just smashed monster trucks together on a NASCAR track.

What you don't understand is that the US has had to import most of the talent that it claims. End immigration, end Google, Microsoft, Silicon Valley.

But we all know that fancy science money would be better much spent building a fortress wall around Texas to keep dem scarrrry mexicans from takin ar jobs

Oh the irony. Criticize people for supposedly stereotyping others by blatantly stereotyping others. Stay classy, liberals.

Do you seriously not understand sarcasm?Stop being a stereotype.

Texas is too dumb to do this

What does being a spiteful tw@t accomplish for you, exactly?

Probably not because we didn't have the computing capacity ten years ago to find the signal back then. In one respect, mankind probably only needs one super-collider because these days our capacity to make additional discoveries from the LHC relies more on the ability to sift through peta-bytes of data from the collisions than it does not building a more powerful supercollider than the LHC. If the US wants to get more involved, they could build additional computing power for CERN, but building another supercollider probably won't be able to produce any new particles that can't be produced by the LHC. The next level of particles predicted to exist are the theoretical strings and gravitons, but the energies required to find them our outside humans' capacity to create them, I think 12 orders of magnitude larger. I think instead of building more supercolliders we might learn more from the new attosecond X-ray lasers which are much cheaper to operate, or possibly use detectors that find and utilize cosmic rays with much higher energies that we could ever create in any manmade accelerator. The X-ray lasers have been used to uncover atomic processes in unparalleled resolution and may one day herald in new nanotechnologies such as high efficiency solar cells or quantum computing.

A correct statement more or less. Good comment.

Thank you, Europe.

Hi Nick, while the LHC is located in Europe, the discoveries that happen there are a product of thousands of scientists from all over the world. In CMS alone there are 42 countries represented.

Thanks for reading!
Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Thank you for posting it!

Is it Jesus particle, Muhammad particle, Buddah particle, Atman particle, Brahmin particle (same difference?), Azmud particle, Quetzalcoatl particle, Odin particle, Yahweh particle, Zeus particle what!? Souls are at stake we deserve an answer!

This thing is really cool. I got the chance to see the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. It was super cool. But nothing compared to this beast. Science Rules!

This is the kind of science the US has stopped doing. The discoveries made by CERN might take decades to find a practical application and they were not spurred by the desire to turn them into an instant profitable result. In the end these discoveries might change our world in ways we cannot anticipate. This is science done for the joy of discovering how the world is put together and unfortunately it is something the US is doing less and less as we have left this kind of expensive science in the hands of underfunded universities and the private sector , who is more interested in profit and immediate applications. We have fallen way behind when it comes to science education and research and our economy will suffer in the future. We have abandoned most of our space endeavours . We reached for the moon but when we realized that it was not strewn with diamonds or something equally valuable we abandoned our race for space . NASA is now a shadow of itself. I wonder how many realize that the computer revolution was ultimately a child of the age of space exploration and so were many of our medical procedures. This was not the intended goal but this is how we benefited. We need to reclaim our proficiency in science if we want to maintain our prosperity and keep up with up and coming countries , like China .

"We reached for the moon but when we realized that it was not strewn with diamonds or something equally valuable we abandoned our race for space" ... You can't be serious.

Well said. I couldn't agree more.

+1 (I'm European)

boogbop, this is an extremely uneducated response. I'd like to inform you that most of the standard model was developed at Fermilab at Illinois. Up until a couple years ago, Fermilab was the leading international laboratory for particle physics. Then, once we learned that CERN had a larger particle collider, and the fact that we were 6 years behind on the Tevatron data(Fermilab's accelerator), we allowed CERN to continue, while we shifted our focus to high energy neutrino research. HOWEVER, CERN's data is equally managed between CERN, Fermilab, and other research laboratories. CERN agreed with Fermilab that since they had so much data, they would distribute it internationally for research. Still at Fermilab, a division called either the LAC or LDC (I can't remember) continues analyzing data collected from CERN, allowing us to monitor the equipment their during our normal hours, while they sleep, and vice-versa. We are still in fact continuing research, but continuing our particle accelerator work is simply not important. Go do some research on Fermilab's high energy neutrino work, if you want to get to know it. And Naropa, its not competition if you read my response. Everybody is working off their data.

This is a total waste.