Higgs Boson Discovered
CERN announced experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson particle
July 04, 2012
The God Particle
On July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had detected a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson — the final missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. The auditorium broke into applause. Peter Higgs, who had predicted the particle's existence in 1964, was in the room and wiped away tears. He won the Nobel Prize the following year. Physicists had spent nearly 50 years and billions of dollars hunting for it.
Why It Matters
The Higgs boson is associated with the Higgs field — an invisible field that permeates all of space. Particles that interact with this field gain mass; those that don't, like photons, remain massless. Without the Higgs mechanism, atoms could not form, matter could not exist, and the universe would be an undifferentiated soup of massless particles flying at the speed of light. The Higgs field is, in a very literal sense, what gives the universe substance.
What's Still Unknown
The discovery completed the Standard Model — a theory that accurately describes three of the four fundamental forces of nature. But it left the deepest mysteries unsolved. It says nothing about gravity, dark matter, dark energy, or why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. The Standard Model is the best theory in science, tested to extraordinary precision, and physicists know it is incomplete. The Higgs discovery is not an ending — it is the confirmation of a framework that needs to be transcended.