More Boring Than Advertised?

You would be forgiven for seeing the headlines from EPS-HEP 2011 and thinking the LHC is less interesting than maybe you were led to believe. A year or so ago you might have expected hints of supersymmetry, black holes, extra dimensions or even something more exotic to have been found in the ever increasing LHC datasets. But the current story is that the Standard Model is still describing all data analysed so far pretty damn well. There may or may not be a hint of a Higgs boson but definitely nothing conclusive. Isn’t that a bit boring?

Unsurprisingly I say no, the reason being that unlike this time last year we now know that nature doesn’t look like these exotic models in the data we’ve looked at. The interesting thing is not that nature could be like this or like that, the interesting thing is what nature is really like. We’re doing science after all!

If that’s not enough to convince you then there’s always Lepton Photon 2011 where some LHC analyses might have twice as much data compared to those presented at EPS. In the meantime just try calling the bland sounding Standard Model ‘Super Amazing Gauge Interacting Relativistic Quantum Wavepacket Theory’ or something…