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It was the biggest of Big Science, a $10 billion effort involving 6,000 researchers, a 17-mile circular tunnel deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland, thousands of torpedo-size magnets capable of bending beams of subatomic matter, and trillions of subatomic collisions — all in the quest for a momentary hint, the slightest residual footprint, of an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.
And it worked. Wednesday’s announcement by scientists in Europe that they’d found the Higgs boson, or something remarkably Higgs-like, was a stunning triumph of both theory and experiment.
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Peter Higgs, an aging theorist who envisioned the particle as a young man in 1964, teared up as he attended the discovery announcement in Geneva.
“It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” Higgs said when he took the microphone before a packed auditorium at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the Higgs-hunting Large Hadron Collider.
The Higgs — famously dubbed “the God particle,” to the chagrin of scientists — is so fundamental to the universe that, in its absence, nothing could exist. The particle is thought to create a sort of force field that permeates the cosmos and imbues other particles with the property known as mass — the resistance to being shoved around.
Actively hunted since the 1970s, the Higgs is the final major piece of the Standard Model, which for physics is the equivalent of chemistry’s Periodic Table.
“To the layman I now say, I think we have it,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN.
“Do you agree?” he asked the crowd.
Applause broke out.
“We have a discovery,” Heuer said. “We have discovered a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. It’s a historic milestone today.”
The scientists at CERN then stood and cheered for a full minute.
The Geneva announcement was a global event, observed in every time zone. Scientists gathered at 3 a.m. Eastern in universities and laboratories across the United States to watch the webcast.
As late as Tuesday afternoon, the leaders of the search weren’t sure if they could announce an actual “discovery” of a new particle or if they would have to fudge their language, deferring to strict notions of scientific certainty. But after a final run of the data, officials concluded that two detectors, named ATLAS and CMS, and operated by separate scientific teams, had met the standard for proving that the particle was real and not an experimental quirk.
What remains unknown is whether the new particle is the theorized Higgs of the Standard Model, or is merely “Higgs-like.” Important properties of the particle remain unclear, such as whether it spins, and whether it interacts with other particles in the expected manner of the theorized Higgs.
Regardless of whether it’s the Higgs or a Higgs imposter, it’s a very real particle, and newly known to science, and apparently fundamental to the texture of the universe.
“Having written my first paper on how and where to look for the Higgs boson back in 1975, this is certainly a big day!” said CERN theorist John Ellis, who celebrated with champagne at a private gathering at his home with Peter Higgs the night before the announcement. “There is no doubt that something very much like the Higgs boson has been discovered.”
