Physics Developments

For John, BLUF:  We missed the boat on physics research, when we cancelled our "collider" near 20 years ago.

Over in Europe scientists think they have found the Higgs boson, in an experiment in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Europe.♠♥.  The title of the Scientific American article is "How the Higgs Boson Might Spell Doom for the Universe."

The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart.  "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.  "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable."

But probably not for a number of eons.

UPDATE:  Added a link and provided some punctuation update.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I blogged about it here.
♥  It could have been in Texas, but the US Congress, which is a prime wasteful spendeer, suspended our investment in this basic scientific research.