PREDICTION: Higgs is found, probably around 2010-2011. Peter Higgs dies one month before discovery and is thus denied Nobel Prize. Today the $10 billion dollar Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland took its first baby step towards operation. The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator ever built. I will now make predictions about the outcome of these experiments - unlike other predictions I make to this I allegedly know what I am talking about on this subject.ġ) The main goal of the LHC is to find the last piece of the so-called standard model. The standard model is a theory that encompasses all known particles and their interactions. There are two types of particles: leptons (including electrons, neutrinos, and their cousins) and fermions (quarks) that interact via gauge bosons (photons, gluons, and the W and Z). The missing piece is something called the Higgs which is supposed to give all of these other particles their mass (without the Higgs, they are all massless). This inspires me to see how I was able to predict the future 10 years ago. Bowen jokingly states that Halzen and Martin never saw the need for the second edition of the book since nothing had changed in particle physics since its publication in 1984.

The founder of IceCube is a particle theorist from University of Wisconsin named Francis Halzen, who is also the author of the most commonly used introductory textbook on particle physics, Quarks and Leptons. Todd Sawicki reposted it publicly on his Sawickipedia blog.* I was recently reminded of my post while reading Telescope in the Ice, a book by Mark Bowen about the construction of the AMANDA and IceCube neutrino telescopes (I worked on these projects for a few years). 10 years ago I sent a newsgroup post to a bunch of college buddies with predictions for what might be discovered at the newly commissioned Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the particle physics lab where I did my Ph.D.

The Telescope in the Ice by Mark Bowen