In the early 1970s physicists sometimes talked of an “Energy Desert.” The idea was that between the electroweak mass scale of 100 GeV and the Planck mass scale of 1019 GeV, nothing was expected to be found... why build new accelerators? Then came the full blossoming of the Standard Model, and then Supersymmetry. Although the predicted Higgs boson should be in the electroweak range (it actually has a mass of about 126 GeV), maybe some superpartners were lying just above. Well, the LHC can now reach 14 × 103 GeV center-of-momentum energy, well above the electroweak range. It doesn't seem very likely that a superpartner is lurking just in that window, but perhaps dark matter particles can be made. Also, the Higgs may be part of a family of scalar bosons. If there are more, some should appear.
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There are some obvious patterns in the known particles that may suggest new physics to someone. There's a striking mass splitting. For example the leptons have three particles, the neutrinos, with negligible mass, and three particles, the electron, muon and tauon, with masses ranging from 0.5 to 1776 MeV. The quarks have three particles, the u, d and s, with masses from 2 to 100 MeV, and three particles, the c, t and b, with masses from 1300 to 173,000 MeV. Predicting masses is a big problem for the Standard Model, and this extreme division is interesting. Consider also that we have 12 gauge bosons. The 8 strong-force bosons, the gluons, and the one electromagnetic boson, the photon, are massless. But the remaining 3 bosons, the weak bosons, have the huge mass of 100 GeV. Note we have 12 particles of matter, and 12 gauge bosons. Could we expect 3 Higgs particles? Actually the simplest supersymmetry models predict this: “The simplest of the many supersymmetric theories is called the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, known as MSSM. The MSSM simply adds the absolute minimum number of terms to the regular Standard Model equation to make it supersymmetric. In MSSM, the Higgs theory predicts not one Higgs boson, but five! One of those five has the properties of the Standard Model Higgs boson.” Then there are axions, hypothetical pseudoscalar particles with presumably very low mass (from a millionth to 1 eV). Their various interactions are required to be so specific that fairly simple experiments should be able to indicate decisively and fairly quickly whether they exist or not. There is no hope of dealing experimentally with quanta of the inflation field or the current dark energy field. The inflatons no longer exist, and the darkons would be as elusive as gravitons.
“It is very difficult to predict, especially the future.” --- Niels Bohr
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The following quotes have been attributed to various physicists.
• You don't have to be the smartest, you just have to be the first.
• If you didn't calculate a number, you didn't do any physics. (Feynman)
• You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” (Feynman)
• The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved. (Dirac, 1929)
• How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress! (Bohr)
• If you are a researcher, you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is. (Witten)