Practical Applications from Higgs Boson Discovery?

From: sanman (manofsan_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/03/04 

Date: 3 Nov 2004 09:02:43 -0800

Hi, I know it's a silly question to ask, but what practical
applications might we eventually see if the Higgs Boson is discovered?
I know, I know, all this research is being done for pure scientific
curiosity without any practical application in sight, but when our
ancestors saw the first natural lodestone magnets, none of them ever
dreamed about how magnetism could used in hard drives or MRAM, etc.

So what could knowledge of the Higgs boson allow us to do? I realize
it's supposed to be a very elusive high-energy particle, but I have
read claims that muon-colliders or higher-energy machines could become
"Higgs factories" -- ie. creating lots of Higgs for study. (I'd also
read about laser wakefield acceleration and wonder if those could be
such higher-energy machines.)

Is it possible that enough Higgs could be artificially produced to
create artificial alterations in the natural Higgs field? Could we
somehow change Spacetime in some useful way through this? For example,
the Quantum Vacuum people say that the interior of QED cavities can
have an altered value for the speed of light. Could the Higgs be a
means by which we could offer energy in exchange for altering the
maximum velocity at which an object can travel?

Here was an interesting article I read:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996558

It talked about the notion of Higgs entanglement, and gave the
Meissner effect as an analogy. If this idea were to bear out, I'd
wonder if it might not lead to a way to overcome the effects of
gravity, for example, or even to artificially generate it. Comments?

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