Science News Top 25
Edited by Erika Engelhaupt

Higgs discovery helps make sense of matter Long-sought boson completes standard model of physics
By Alexandra Witze

It’s hard enough to muster a standing-room-only crowd for a physics talk, let alone an overnight queue. But on the night of July 3, scientists sacrificed sleep to line up outside the main auditorium at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Their goal: get a seat to hear Joe Incandela. It wasn’t the laconic, gray-suited scientist they had lined up for, though. Incandela, a particle physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was expected to be the first to unveil the biggest physics news in years. At 9 o’clock the next morning, with the auditorium packed, Incandela launched into a flood of charts and graphs. Blips in the data represented what happened when proton beams slammed into one another in CERN’s mammoth particle collider. Buried in this data was one blip representing a subatomic celebrity that scientists had been hunting for years — the Higgs boson. Incandela didn’t disappoint. “We’re seeing something; it’s relatively significant,” he told the anxious onlookers. He clicked to the next slide. The blip grew bigger. There it was: the Higgs. The room erupted in applause. The next speaker, CERN’s Fabiola Gianotti, only strengthened the case when she unveiled her team’s evidence. In many ways, that moment at CERN was the culmination of decades of scientific questing. Finding the Higgs meant that physicists had finally succeeded in explaining why the universe looks the way it does (SN: 7/28/12, pp. 5, 26 & 28). Their framework of the universe at the subatomic scale was complete. “When it comes to discovering the ultimate workings of reality, the easy part is now officially over,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech. “We’ve put the finishing touches on a complete theory of the matter we see around us in our everyday lives.” Now that most scientists agree the Higgs is here, they can begin to map uncharted realms, from the possibility of extra dimensions of space and time to massive, secretive particles that shadow those already known. Ultimately, the Higgs particle is important because it helps explain mass. It and the closely related Higgs field are the reason the universe didn’t remain a sea of massless particles after the Big Bang. Just nanoseconds after the cosmos was born, a field permeating all of space switched on. This was the Higgs field (named, like the particle, after University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, one of several scientists who dreamed up the idea in the 1960s). Suddenly some of the particles zipping around hit the Higgs field and slowed down, I