There have been heaps of excitement about the official launch today of the Large Hadron Collider—whether it's visions of protons flying around the world's largest particle accelerator and creaming one another, or for some, the thought of those collisions creating world-destroying black holes.
But if the LHC works exactly the way many scientists hope, the results could be booooooring: finding the Higgs boson—the only particle that's predicted by the current standard model of particle physics but not found—and perhaps a few more expected phenomena along the way. However, nature works in weird ways, especially when you're recreating energies last seen during the Big Bang. So there's a fighting chance that the LHC will be much more than a $10 billion validator: It won't destroy the world, but it certainly could turn the physics world upside-down.
The 5^th Dimension (and 6^th, and 7^th…)
So what would take the entire physics community ...
