[thedoc (OP)]

paulbooker asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Do you think we are coming to the end of experimental high energy physics?

What do you think?

[syhprum]

I don't think that the scientific community will ever consider that they have built the largest machine that is required to do all the research that they would like to do but I believe that at Cern the largest machine that it is possible to finance has already been built.

[Bill S]

http://www.nature.com/news/billion-dollar-particle-collider-gets-thumbs-up-1.17579?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20150521

There are still some fair sized projects in planning.

[jccc]

i think yes. no much been discovered/done. similar to gravitron detecting.

[PmbPhy]

paulbooker asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Do you think we are coming to the end of experimental high energy physics?

What do you think?

No. Not at all. What I do think is that politicians are loosing their patience with the cost so that particle physicists will have to find different sources of high energy particles. It's been suggested that somehow we collect cosmic rays and use them as the source of high energy particles. If we really knew how to handle individual particles and use their energy on an individual basis then it would be a wonderful source of energy. For example: a particle with 1 PeV (1 petaelectron volt = 1x10¹⁵ joules) has enough energy to satisfy the yearly energy consumption of Greenland!

[evan_au]

a particle with 1 PeV (1 petaelectron volt = 1x10¹⁵ joules) has enough energy to satisfy the yearly energy consumption of Greenland!

the energies of the most energetic ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) have been observed to approach 3 × 10²⁰ eV, about 40 million times the energy of particles accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider. At 50 J, the highest-energy ultra-high-energy cosmic rays have energies comparable to the kinetic energy of a 90-kilometre-per-hour (56 mph) baseball

Unless Greenland really thrives on baseball, I think your calculator added a few zeroes, Pete!

Astronomical sources are really useful:

• Cosmic rays were the source of many early experiments on subatomic particles.
  
• There are  thought to be important effects in nuclear physics that occurred in the Big Bang which require far higher energies again (like finding the reason why matter outnumbers antimatter in our part of the universe).
  
• Even if we can't tame them, Cosmic rays have been used to counter fears that the LHC would produce black holes which grow and consume the Earth. If this could happen, cosmic rays with far more energy would have already consumed the Moon.
  
• As shown by the ongoing discussions about black holes, physicists would love to have a tame black hole to investigate quantum gravity - just don't put it in my back yard! 
• Astronomers using gravitational wave detectors would be delighted by some closely-orbiting black holes or neutron stars within range of their detectors! Meanwhile they just have to wait, and keep improving their detectors. 

[PmbPhy]

Unless Greenland really thrives on baseball, I think your calculator added a few zeroes, Pete!

Hmmmm .... It appears that I got my units mixed up in my mind. I confused Peta Joules ()PJ) with Peta electronvolts (PeV). See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29

Peta Joule - (PJ) = 1x10¹⁵ J = yearly electricity consumption in Greenland as of 2008

Thanks for pointing that out for me.

I came across that site by this one:
http://nakedcern.blogspot.com/2013/04/one-petaelectronvolt-of-energy.html

.....
Ok, it's still much less than the famous Oh-My-God particle (yes, that exists, I did not make up that name!!! ) which had almost a zettaelectronvolt of energy That is about equivalent to a 142 g baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour! (not the world energy consumption, if you also misread the wikipedia table as I did ).

Now that's hilarious. This guy made almost the same mistake that I did! Lol!!

[Atomic-S]

In the year 2115, scientists may be able to do experiments far beyond anything now possible.

[evan_au]

There is a proposal to upgrade an existing particle accelerator to smash electrons into nuclei at very high energy. In theory, this might produce simpler interactions with clearer results than the complex interactions of smashing protons together (which are both bags of quarks).

There are also suggestions that now we know a bit about the properties of the Higgs Boson, it should be possible to make a specialised "Higgs factory" that produces them much faster and more cheaply than the LHC, to enable a detailed study of their properties.

And there are always stories about new ways to accelerate particles - for example, I saw one claim that you could accelerate charged particles to high velocities by having them "surf" on laser pulses. It was suggested that one day this could achieve the similar energies in a house-sized laboratory that would take the size of a small town using the traditional accelerator ring. If costs come down this much, every physics department could have their own, instead collaborating with 2,000 other physicists on the same experiment at the LHC.

[jeffreyH]

Talking about the Higgs boson, what is the relationship between it and inertia? I must admit to knowing next to nothing about the Higgs boson.

[Atomic-S]

It would appear that the demise of high-energy physics has been greatly overstated.

[PmbPhy]

Talking about the Higgs boson, what is the relationship between it and inertia? I must admit to knowing next to nothing about the Higgs boson.

Same here my friend. Many of my physicist friends don't know particle physics and as such don't know about this Higgs thing. I'd say that you should use extreme caution if you want to learn about this before you're ready to study a real particle physics text and learn it the right way. Unlearning things are not easy to do.