Why Physicists Long for the Straight and Narrow

摘要

Europe's Large Hadron Collider should be powerful enough to find a new generation of particles, but not to get to know them well. To outward appearances, there's little excitement in particle physics these days. All the particles predicted by physicists' Standard Model have been found and are being studied, so it might seem that scientists have little left to do but mop up the details. Researchers beg to differ: Far from having finished their work, they feel they are on the brink of something much bigger. The buzz centers on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a superpowerful proton smasher, slated to come online in 2007. Particle physicists are confident that this machine will help them break out of the strait-jacket of the Standard Model into a new realm of particles. "It's going to inaugurate a new golden age in particle physics," says Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "There's a whole new world of phenomena" that LHC is likely to discover, he says, "with very rich and very fundamental implications."