The biggest problem with all of this “God Particle” nonsense is that it’s a rather short-sighted way of announcing to the world that the particle physics community doesn’t need any more money, thanks.
Besides greed, there’s the simple fact that while discovering the Higgs means that we’re on the right track with this whole Standard Model, it is absolutely not the end of the story. What doesn’t the Higgs tell us?
- It doesn’t explain how gravity works.
- For that matter, it doesn’t really tell us much about how the strong force relates to the electroweak force — the combination of electromagnetism and the weak force for which the Higgs is so useful.
- It doesn’t tell us what dark matter is — roughly 23% of the energy of the universe.
- It doesn’t tell us what dark energy is — another 72% of the universe.
- It doesn’t tell us why the electric charge is what it is, or an electron mass is what it is, or really, much at all about a huge number of physical constant.
- It doesn’t explain why we have certain symmetries in our universe and not others.
I guess what I’m saying is: more money, please.
