[tw]

From the BBC of 3 Jan 2005:

Energising the quest for 'big theory'
"We are at a point where experiments must guide us, we cannot make progress without them," explains Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

"We must wait for the data to speak."

Over a coffee in the lobby of building 40 at Cern, the sprawling experimental facility situated on the Swiss-French border, Professor Virdee says physics has reached a critical juncture. ...

The $2.3bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern (The European Centre for Nuclear Research), which is paid for by contributions from Cern's European member countries (including the UK), should reinvigorate physics' biggest endeavour: a grand theory to describe all physical phenomena in nature.

When it is switched on for a pilot run in summer 2007, this huge physics experiment will collide two beams of particles head-on at super-fast speeds, recreating the conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

In 1998, two teams studying supernovae showed that this dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Subsequent work revealed that dark energy may make up about 70% of the Universe, but the best theories could not explain it.

According to John Ellis, however, the Higgs field is the perfect candidate for the source of dark energy.