The Road Ahead

Abstract

I describe the surrounding landscape on the road to the CERN Large Hadron Collider. I revisit the milestones of hadron-collider physics, and from them draw lessons for the future. I recall the primary motivation for the journey - understanding the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking - and speculate that even greater discoveries may await us. I review the physics that we know beyond the standard model - dark matter, dark energy, and neutrino masses - and discuss the status of grand-unified theories. I list the reasons why the Higgs boson is central to the standard model as well as to physics beyond the standard model.