Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.<p>Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?<p>What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?<p>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?<p>That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."<p>Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?