Dear Tommaso, yes, it's helpful that you were forced to write this addition now. But this vector boson pair plays a similar role for the Higgs discovery as a training session does for a future olympic winner (I didn't want to use the example with the difference between masturbation and sex because yours is such a polite blog).

Such a training is surely important for the future olympic winner, and in some sense, he is doing the same things as he does at the Olympic games. But the other people are arguably sensible if they think that the training is not quite the same thing as the victorious race at the Olympics, aren't they? ;-)

Moreover, the Higgs has really been counted in the stock prices for several decades so it is questionable whether the Higgs discovery itself is a good counterpart of an Olympic victory.

Hi Tommaso, as explained above, I completely agree with that. The training is also important for the Olympic winner's victory. It (the training) is just not too interesting, especially not for others (besides the athlete and his coach). ;-)

Now, should that be viewed as an important thing for others and for science in general? Well, I don't know. It's a part of the experimenters' job and good for them if they enjoy it. But there's no guarantee that all parts of experimenters' job are interesting or important from other, more general viewpoints.

It is a training. As you know very well, these decays have been calculable (and predicted) for 35 years. In this sense, it's not "new physics". It's similar to new physics, but the similarity is only in the technical, training-like aspects of the experiments, not in their far-reaching conclusions. Do you agree with that?

I agree, it's great to test theories, even those that have been established. Every new agreement is a great feeling, especially if you forget that you have had the same one many times. :-) But aren't you sometimes tempted to think that theories that are further from the energy frontier, even though they are even more well-established, could be more interesting (because e.g. much more accurate or practical) to be re-tested than e.g. decays in QCD?

It would be interesting to hear how you would be comparing the importance of further tests in various realms of physics. For example, if I were doing new and new tests of "old" physics, QED would probably be preferred over QCD. It can be done so accurately and it is so important for life and technology. Clearly, when one - an individual physicist or a funding agency - prefers QCD tests over QED tests, it must be justified by its being closer to the energy frontier which is more uncertain. But is it really more uncertain or just inherently less accurate?

Is there some bound on the estimated confidence level above which you would think that additional USD 10 million is no longer a good investment for further tests? Do you think that there is a semi-quantitative formalism to make such choices rationally? Now, clearly, a particular collider can only do certain things. But there are still many ways how to define the tasks and how much attention should be given to each.

It might be that these simple events with a few particles are just too "old physics". Knowing that it would probably not get past those 100 GeV too safely, shouldn't have Tevatron been rebuilt a few years ago and used for some RHIC-like AdS/CFT heavy ion physics, or anything that can lead to qualitatively new limits and phenomena?

Dear Tommaso, to justify low-energy QCD research by baryogenesis sounds really surprising to me. Don't you need baryon violation which is what occurs at much higher energies than low-energy QCD? The electroweak baryogenesis is the lowest-scale realization I have heard about.

Or do you want to know how protons appear out of three quarks? What are the quantities you exactly want to calculate here?