20 October 2011

How will CERN manage the lack of discoveries?

CERN management is nervous. After having spent 5 billion euros to build the LHC, the lack of discoveries, unanimously predicted by all physicists in the world, is embarassing. The latest internal CERN proposal on how to deal with the situation makes two statements.

- No discovery is even more interesting than the discovery of the Higgs. It would be "revolutionary".

- CERN needs to take more data to say more.

What a weak report! Since the report is so weak, I bet that:

- CERN will NOT publish the Higgs results for the first 5 inverse femtobarns this year.

- CERN will SPREAD the results (say for 3 fb^-1, then for 4, then for 5) over various months in 2012, to stay in the press, even though the results will be available long before those dates.

There will be a distressingly long waiting time ahead, due to bad politics only.

In the meantime, CERN people should read Schiller's strand model. He predicted the lack of any new discoveries a few years ago. He also proposes a consistent solution for all open problems of the standard model. And he did not need 5 billion euros to do so.