FAQ: Made any discoveries yet?

Particle physics seems to have a knack for producing dramatic headlines. The LHC will produce data on such questions as dark matter, how matter behaved the first fractions of a second after the big bang, the Higgs boson and electroweak symmetry breaking, the hierarchy problem, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions, with the possibility of stuff like micro black holes and strangelets thrown in for good measure. It will do it at the highest energy man has ever reached with sub-atomic particles, somewhere between 3.5 and 7 times the energy of the next closest accelerator, with four massive collision point detectors eagerly catching every little thing they can. This goes on round the clock, day in and day out, a constant string of tests and calibrations and collisions, and it has been since the end of March.

The perfectly logical next question is, made any discoveries yet? When will the experiments produce results about all these questions?

After much thought and many uncomfortable blank stares, I have finally come up with an analogy to answer this question.

A particle physics experiment is like being handed a die with 1 million sides. The only way to see what is on one of the sides is to throw the die. Each side of the die is labeled with one of maybe twenty-five symbols, some of which are thousands of times more common than others. Your task is to answer questions such as, which symbol is the most common, what is the ratio between the number of squares to the number of circles, is there one star somewhere on this die?

Finding the most common symbols wouldn't take too long, because they would show up frequently as you roll the die. To determine whether or not something is actually on the die, you need to make several million rolls. After the first million, you would only expect to see it once, so seeing it not at all is not terribly unlikely. Proving it isn't there would take a lot longer.

At CERN, all those interesting questions have much less than a one in a million chance of happening. So LHC has a great deal of dice-rolling to do.