Quantum theory debunked?

Former Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like a house of cards with nothing to replace it.

The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts contemplating a "plan B", failure could lead to "chaos and infighting".

He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of sceintific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter.

It would also lead to bitter recriminations and infighting among the different scientists and a complete loss of confidence among the general public and taxpayer, he said.

"Everybody is in a festive mood," said Professor Afshar who is now a research professor at Rowman University in New Jersey.

"Champagne corks are ready to get popped but what is going to happen if nothing happens?

"There will be an all-out war among physicists. It will be a nightmarish situation that will put physics back into the wilderness.

"We need to have a plan B. We need to get people together before it is too late to make contingency plans."

Professor Afshar said that it will be two or three years before the huge machine in Switzerland that cost £4billion to build can be judged as a success or a failure.

But he believes that the hype surrounding the particle accelerator has meant that if it fails to establish anything - a strong possibility in his eyes - it will lead to disillusionment with science.

"It is not that I have an axe to grind against the LHC," he said.

"I am just tremendously worried about what wil happen if we don't find the Higgs Boson. We have spent £10bn (£6.3bn) to ensure that we find the existence of this particle.

"If by the end of this process - say two or three years - we don't find it. There will be infighting, recriminations.

"I am not saying I am right and everybody is wrong. I am saying let us be prepared for the experiment to be a failure. Let us be prepared for it to go wrong.

"We need to start having discussions about what are the alternatives. Because if the LHC fails, then the Standard Model fails. If the Standard Model fails we have nothing left.

"We are putting all our eggs in one basket. We need to prepare ourselves for this possibility and not in a state of panic."

No.  First off, LHC has not failed yet so this is all hypothetical.  Even if it does fail to find the Higgs boson that doesn't mean quantum theory has been "debunked;" a failed prediction from the standard model doesn't throw out the huge amount of established science that is basically the foundation of modern technology.

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So why has that moslem prof got his knickers in a twist?

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Agreed.  If the Higgs boson exists, but they can't find it, then it's probably just heavier than they thought (minor adjustment of the standard model).  If it doesn't exist, then the standard model will need some srs revising.  However, that doesn't throw out QFT, let alone canonical quantum mechanics.

A similarly bad case is for the LHC to find the Higgs boson and nothing else.  In that case, the last prediction of the standard model would be verified, but nothing new would come out.  High energy physics would really be dead, since there'd be almost no chance of convincing taxpayers, or anybody else to build an even larger device to find something not predicted by the standard model.  At the same time, the standard model is known to be broken because it can't account for gravity.