Caltech physicist Barry Barish is the director of the global design effort for the International Linear Collider, which is currently in the planning stages. If built, the ILC would smash together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, at nearly the speed of light. The ILC would complement the Large Hadron Collider, a European proton collider that is the world’s most powerful but has had technical problems that will prevent it from operating at full power until 2013. That gives the world’s second most powerful collider, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., a slim chance to be first to find evidence for the long-sought Higgs boson, which has been proposed as the particle responsible for providing other particles with mass. Following a presentation on February 22 in San Diego at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, Barish answered questions from the audience and news media about the future of particle physics. Science News Deputy Managing Editor Elizabeth Quill compiled some of his comments.
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Do physicists think that the Large Hadron Collider’s findings will be the end of particle physics?
There is a tendency we have among ourselves to use colorful language — quarks, neutrinos and all these things — but also maybe to speak in hyperbole…. [The end] is nowhere near because we barely can formulate the right questions to ask yet about the early universe…. We have a popular theory called string theory, and string theory doesn’t predict very much at this stage … yet people go around calling it the theory of everything.