Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
Published online 30 January 2008 | Nature 451, 507 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451507a
News in Brief: Snapshot
Snapshot: Search for Higgs primed to start
Assembly of detector completes Large Hadron Collider.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
I do not expect that the Higgs particle will be found. Although I am not a physicist, I always wondered why a common phenomenon as the expansion of the universe being almost according to R=c.t, is regarded as a triviality. Nobody ever thinks about it as being something very essential. If R=c.t is not a triviality, but some law of nature, this might lead to a new understanding of universe expansion, leaving no room for immense amounts of dark matter and inflation and without all the horizon problems. (By the way, inflation theory calculates that early expansion is almost 3^8m/sec...!) Henk Schutte, 31-1 2008
The search for the Higgs is already, or rather still going on, at the TeVatron (Fermilab) - albeit at a considerably slower rate than LHC would achieve if it were fully operational. If the TeVatron continues full speed ahead and LHC has problems, it could become an interesting race. Also, no-one with any basic training in particle theory believes that the Higgs 'endows all other particles with mass'. Strongly interacting particles like the proton receive most of their mass from quite a different reason, to do with the vacuum of QCD and confinement. (Frank Wilczek would be happy to explain this more coherently...)
As a "minor" correction, please note that the piece being lowered is 1430 tons. The entire CMS detector weighs in at 12500 tons!