“We’re at a really interesting time because when we started, we knew the LHC would either discover the Higgs or rule it out completely,” says Nellist. “Now we have many unanswered questions, and yet we don’t have a direct road map saying that if we just follow these steps, we’ll find something.”
Ten years on from the Higgs discovery, how does she cope with the possibility that the LHC might not answer any more of these fundamental questions? “I’m very pragmatic,” she says. “It’s a bit frustrating, but as an experimental physicist I believe the data, and so if we do an analysis and get a null result, then we move on and look in a different place—we’re just measuring what nature provides.”
The LHC isn’t the only big science facility hunting for answers to these existential questions. ADMX might be the garage band to LHC’s stadium rockers in terms of…
