Nature’s secrets foretold
Higgs discovery celebrates math’s power to make predictions about the real world
By now, all aficionados of physics news — and quite a few people who don’t know physics from phonics — have heard about the discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s the biggest news in physics ever tweeted. And it came after a long wait. For more than three decades, the Higgs has been physicists’ version of King Arthur’s Holy Grail, Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick. It’s been an obsession, a fixation, an addiction to an idea that almost every expert believed just had to be true.
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But despite years of searching, using the most complex machines ever built on the planet, the Higgs remained as elusive as a World Series ring for a Chicago Cub. Until now. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have finally established the existence of a new particle, weighing in at a mass of about 11 dozen protons, matching the description of the fugitive Higgs. “We’re reaching into the fabric of the universe at a level we’ve never done before,” says physicist Joe Incandela, spokesman for one of the teams reporting the discovery.