[BurnGpuBurn]

Yes? Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?

[Filligree]

Not hardly. If there was no Higgs, then some other mechanism would be needed to cause the same effects the Higgs does. We’d need the LHC even more then.

[ejolto]

No it would mean the standard model is wrong and there would be more to discover.

[rcxdude]

No, you keep running the machine, hoping to find a useful signal. More data means more fidelity. A lot of that has been probing the properties of the Higgs, but it's also spent a lot of time ruling out quite a lot of proposed extensions to the standard model.

[seanhunter]

Not even close. The party would seriously be on because then you'd need some alternative that explained the new hole in the standard model.

[empath75]

The LHC wasn't built to discover the higgs. Another primary motivation was looking for supersymmetry and dark matter candidates. But really it was more general than that. Every time we've built a bigger collider we've found something new, and on some level, they just wanted to see what would happen. New data means new things to explain.

[fastasucan]

>Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?

No, not at all.

[12_throw_away]

No. This has been answered multiple times up and down the thread.