[MHGinTN]

I have a curiosity question for ya: IF a particle were created in the collision which left through the 'cloud chamber' at greater than the speed of light, how would it be registered on the recording devices? ... I've been wanting to ask Lisa Randall that question ever since reading her book Warped Passages.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. It would require infinite energy for anything with mass to attain the speed of light, and FTL travel in any form creates unresolvable paradoxes. That’s the simple answer, anyway.

[SunkenCiv]

That's actually a good one. The effect isn't like a bullet hitting a bullet most of the time, but when it does happen, it'll make prittteee sparks.

IF a particle were created in the collision which left through the 'cloud chamber' at greater than the speed of light, how would it be registered on the recording devices?

The amount of energy needed to get that last fraction of the velocity of light exceeds the energy needed to get it to that near-light velocity in the first place (according to Albert). So it won't happen in this device. Probably. Even if the streams were headed in the same direction, crossing the streams would do something completely anti-intuitive, rather than imparting momentum to the frontmost billiard ball (as it were) and producing a tachyon which would register before the interaction took place. That would in itself be a monumental discovery -- but I'm pretty sure that, after a few years, we'll all be glad that the LHC was built in Europe with mostly European money.

I think I linked to some other topics regarding the search for the Higgs boson, and there are those who think (probably correctly, IMVHO) that earlier experiments have failed to turn up any evidence for its existence. That's not to say that -- as with the failed neutrino detection experiments -- an ad hoc save-the-theory expediency won't be cooked up, to allow physicists to totter along with the Standard Model another forty years or so. ;')