Not so light reading (but not so heavey either) for a Monday morn:
http://www.phys.lsu.edu/...lty/pullin/sciam.pdf

So the coming experiments from Large Hadron Collider are really severely needed.

Starting up a Large Hadron Collider is a tradition that physicists carry out every 14 billion years or so.

Jay

Starting up a Large Hadron Collider is a tradition that physicists carry out every 14 billion years or so.

Jay

...Watch them finally flip the switch on Dec 21, 2012.

ATLAS Preparing for Collisions in Late-2009

The most recent schedule announced by CERN envisions beam in LHC in late November 2009. The first high-energy collisions (with a total energy of 7 TeV) will occur after mid-December. Later in 2010, the energy is expected to be taken towards 10 TeV. This is exciting news for ATLAS and the other experiments. It means that within a year’s horizon ATLAS will have substantial data allowing full physics analyses and even a possibility of new discoveries...

In his [Albert Einstein] theory,
the gravitational force arises as a consequence
of space and time (which together form “spacetime”)
being curved by the presence of matter. A
loose analogy is that of a bowling ball
placed on a rubber sheet along with a
marble that is rolling around nearby. The
balls could represent the sun and the
earth, and the sheet is space. The bowling
ball creates a deep indentation in the rubber
sheet, and the slope of this indentation
causes the marble to be deflected toward
the larger ball, as if some force—gravity—
were pulling it in that direction. Similarly,
any piece of matter or concentration of
energy distorts the geometry of spacetime,
causing other particles and light rays to be
deflected toward it, a phenomenon we
call gravity.

...

Because general relativity deals in the geometry of
spacetime, a quantum theory of gravity
will in addition be a quantum theory of
spacetime.

My money is on NOT finding the Higgs Boson.

Why? Well, in a nutshell...

GR shows that matter/energy curve spacetime, and that curvature in turn makes matter/energy behave as if a force were working on it. We merely percieve this as a force. Therefore, how can we quantize something that isn't really a force, but is instead a product of spacetime itself?

As a friend of mine says, "Gravity is the racetrack, not the engine."

What if the racetrack (space/time) itself is quantized. There are theories that postulate that there is a limit below which space cannot be regarded as a continuous "sheet." And, time is discreet in that it has no existence shorter than a change in the state of these patches of space.

You never "quantize a force". You quantize a force that's interacting with matter.

This is evidenced by electromagnetic radiation -- the value of a quantum of em energy is controlled by the electron orbital's configuration.

...
IMHO... Just as we needed to first understand what matter and energy was before we could quantize it, then develope a theory(s) (E.g., QED, QCD), we need to first understand what spacetime really is before we can develope a successful theory of quantum gravity.