With discovery of the Higgs, science can celebrate math’s power to probe nature
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 the physics world ever to be 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 Leon’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.
But despite years of searching, using the most complex machines ever constructed on the planet, the Higgs remained as elusive as a World Series ring for a Chicago Cub. Until now. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have finally claimed evidence establishing the existence of a new particle, weighing in at a mass of a little more than 11 dozen protons, matching the description of the fugitive Higgs.