Particle physics may have reached the end of the line
I think a little context here is in order: from a 10000-foot high level, the particles that can be seen depend on the amount of energy present in the system, which is why we spend billions of dollars accelerating basic particles (protons in the case of the LHC) to high energies and literally SMASH them together, so we can see what flies out.<p>We see four distinct, different forces in the universe: strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Our Standard Model predicts that these forces become more unified at higher energy levels:<p>1. Electromagnetism merges with weak nuclear force at 246 GeV<p>2. Electroweak force merges with strong nuclear force at around ~10^16 GeV ('grand unification')<p>3. Finally, quantum mechanics predicts these forces become <i>unified</i>, which is to say indistinguishable, at the Planck energy, around 10^19 GeV.<p>As we get closer to predicted unification energies, we see different mixes of particles, and the Higgs boson is in fact the particle responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, with a mass of around 126 GeV.<p>The problem is that the LHC produces collisions of around 10^4 GeV, so from our current energy scale up to the next unification, with the strong force, we're off by a factor of 10^12.<p>Back of the envelope estimate is that a supercollider that can reach grand unification energies with our current technology would be around the size of the solar system.<p>Hence the article: particle smashing is a brute-force approach to investigating new physics, but now there is an extremely wide gulf between what we have discovered, and what we think lies next, hence we need to be more clever than using brute force.