Come out, come out, wherever you are!

IN MARCH, after a two-year shut down for an upgrade, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reopen for business. The rest of the year will see physicists biting their nails—for one way or another 2015 will go down as a famous date in their field. Either theoreticians will be proved spectacularly right, and experimenters can move confidently on into the verdant pastures of so-called new physics, engaging in a positive safari of hunting for novel particles, or they will find out, to exaggerate only slightly, that they do not understand how the universe really works.

The LHC’s main job, now it has found the much-heralded Higgs boson, is to track down an almost equally heralded—and more than equally elusive—phenomenon called Susy. This is the nickname physicists have given to the concept of supersymmetry, which lies at the heart of most models of new physics.