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Stephon Alexander on NOVA
Penn State faculty Stephon Alexander is featured on the NOVA web site in an audio clip in a section called The Big Deal. When CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2008, it will be the world's largest and most expensive machine. Why build an $8 billion behemoth to search for the smallest particles in the universe? Seven top physicists describe why it's so important, and explain what they hope to find...
‘The thing that would surprise me the most is if we don't find the Higgs particle, which is responsible for endowing mass to all the other elementary particles. Our whole universe is permeated with the Higgs, but we still haven't seen this particle. And that's what one of the big goals of the LHC will be. I think, for me, the big problem is understanding, is the Higgs fundamental? Is it something that parameterizes some yet unknown new physics? You know, if we find the Higgs, or if we don't find the Higgs, it will tell us about what that new physics could be. If we could probe a theory beyond this model that we have that describes all of physics except for gravity at a quantum-mechanical level, the first thing that would go through my mind is a quote by Albert Einstein, in which he said, "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible." But if we don't know, if the experiments tell us something that comes from left field, and we're like, "What's going on here? The standard model works so well, but now it doesn't work at all," then it's not gonna stop us from trying to figure that out. But we'd need to go back to the drawing board and think all over again about how particle physics is connected to the cosmos.’