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Does Particle Physics Have A Future On Earth?

At a fundamental level, what is our Universe made of? This question has driven physics forward for centuries. Even with all the advances we've made, we still don't know it all. While the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson and completed the Standard Model earlier this decade, the full suite of the particles we know of only make up 5% of the total energy in the Universe.

We don't know what dark matter is, but the indirect evidence for it is overwhelming. Same deal with dark energy. Or questions like why the fundamental particles have the masses they do, or why neutrinos aren't massless, or why our Universe is made of matter and not antimatter. Our current tools and searches have not answered these great existential puzzles of modern physics. Particle physics now faces an incredible dilemma: try harder, or give up.

The particles and interactions that we know of are all governed by the Standard Model of particle physics, plus gravity, dark matter, and dark energy. In particle physics experiments, however, it's the Standard Model alone that matters. The six quarks, charged leptons and neutrinos, gluons, photon, gauge bosons and Higgs boson are all that it predicts, and each particle has been not only discovered, but their properties have been measured.

As a result, the Standard Model is perhaps a victim of its own success. The masses, spins, lifetimes, interaction strengths, and decay ratios of every particle and antiparticle have all been measured, and they agree with the Standard Model's predictions at every turn. There are enormous puzzles about our Universe, and particle physics has given us no experimental indications of where or how they might be solved.

It might be tempting, therefore, to presume that building a superior particle collider would be a fruitless endeavor. Indeed, this could be the case. The Standard Model of particle physics has explicit predictions for the couplings that occur between particles. While there are a number of parameters that remain poorly determined at present, it's conceivable that there are no new particles that a next-generation collider could reveal.

The heaviest Standard Model particle is the top quark, which takes roughly ~180 GeV of energy to create. While the Large Hadron Collider can reach energies of 14 TeV (about 80 times the energy needed to create a top quark), there might not be any new particles present to find unless we reach energies in excess of 1,000,000 times as great. This is the great fear of many: the possible existence of a so-called "energy desert" extending for many orders of magnitude.

But it's also possible that there is new physics present at a modest scale beyond where we've presently probed. There are many theoretical extensions to the Standard Model that are quite generic, where deviations from the Standard Model's predictions can be detected by a next-generation collider.

If we want to know what the truth about our Universe is, we have to look, and that means pushing the present frontiers of particle physics into uncharted territory. Right now, the community is debating between multiple approaches, with each one having its pros and cons. The nightmare scenario, however, isn't that we'll look and won't find anything. It's that infighting and a lack of unity will doom experimental physics forever, and that we won't get a next-generation collider at all.

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Will it be successful? Regardless of what we find, that answer is unequivocally yes. In experimental physics, success does not equate to finding something, as some might erroneously believe. Instead, success means knowing something, post-experiment, that you did not know before you did the experiment. To push beyond the presently known frontiers, we'd ideally want both a lepton and a proton collider, at the highest energies and collision rates we can achieve.

There is no doubt that new technologies and spinoffs will come from whichever collider or colliders come next, but that's not why we do it. We are after the deepest secrets of nature, the ones that will remain elusive even after the Large Hadron Collider finishes. We have the technical capabilities, the personnel, and the expertise to build it right at our fingertips. All we need is the political and financial will, as a civilization, to seek the ultimate truths about nature.

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