What's New, Higgsy?
... everybody's talking ... ... I was lost, and now I'm found ... Or at least it walks like a duck. Well, it's nice to have found something, even if it did cost 10 GBucks. Bee notes that the last previous elementary particle discovery occurred when she was in high school. She also has a nice meditation on the present state of things. And so, strangely, on this sunny day for high energy particle physics, I feel somewhat blue about the prospects. It's been almost two decades since the last discovery of a particle that we presently believe is elementary, the top quark in 1995, which was the year I finished high school. It's been a long way and an enormous effort to that little bump in the above plot. There isn't so much more we can do with hadron colliders. If we try really hard, we can ramp up the energy a little and improve the luminosity a little. Of course what we want next is a lepton collider like the ILC that will complete the picture that the LHC deli...