In the discussion thread accompanying that piece by Peter Woit, there is a serious and disturbing proposal regarding the ineffectiveness of the LHC:
"if the LHC ends up not running at all for a string of accidents big and small, I’d still not caress the idea that we should start playing card games. It will just be a demonstration that we have built a toy too big to play with.
Every student who has seen the relation between curvature radius and bending dipole field, and the dependence of synchrotron power loss with curvature, has the tools to wonder how large an accelerator humans can build. Unfortunately, though, those are not the only parameters. The space-time failure probability d2F/dVdt depends on the volume of the device, and this becomes a hindrance to scalability. It is obvious if you go to four dimensions and examine time instead of space dependence, trying to ask if you can keep the total failure probability small while increasing the duration of the experiment indefinitely.
The LHC might just be beyond the limit of spatial dimensions allowed by present-century technology. It would be very sad, but I’d argue that we shouldn’t draw more conclusions from it, other than some of the project leaders should have known bet" (c)
...just hope that the commentator is proven wrong at the end of the day
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there is a serious and disturbing proposal regarding the ineffectiveness of the LHC:
"if the LHC ends up not running at all for a string of accidents big and small, I’d still not caress the idea that we should start playing card games. It will just be a demonstration that we have built a toy too big to play with.
Every student who has seen the relation between curvature radius and bending dipole field, and the dependence of synchrotron power loss with curvature, has the tools to wonder how large an accelerator humans can build. Unfortunately, though, those are not the only parameters. The space-time failure probability d2F/dVdt depends on the volume of the device, and this becomes a hindrance to scalability. It is obvious if you go to four dimensions and examine time instead of space dependence, trying to ask if you can keep the total failure probability small while increasing the duration of the experiment indefinitely.
The LHC might just be beyond the limit of spatial dimensions allowed by present-century technology. It would be very sad, but I’d argue that we shouldn’t draw more conclusions from it, other than some of the project leaders should have known bet"
(c)
...just hope that the commentator is proven wrong at the end of the day