Aug. 3, 2014, 9:45 a.m.

Higgs Boson

We all know about the discovery of the Higgs boson. However there is one question that bugs me a lot:

The LHC cost about $5bn to build, and it can attain energies up to 8TeV. This was needed to discover the Higgs boson with an energy of 126GeV. But if the Higgs was much more energetic, we would not have had the money to fund a particle accelerator that would be able to find it. How does it work that the energy of the Higgs was just right so that we could (barely) afford the $5bn for a particle accelerator that could find it? Had it been much more energetic, we might have needed a particle accelerator ten times the circumference, at a cost of perhaps $50bn, most unlikely to ever be approved?