The Elusive Higgs This summer, it looked dismal for the so-
called God particle. But this week, brighter news appeared on
the horizon. The Higgs field gives particles their mass and
discovery of the Higgs particle (which The New York Times
describes as “the quantum personification of this field”) would
confirm a critical part of the Standard Model of physics, which
describes the basic building blocks of matter and their
interactions. The Large Hadron Collider was essentially built to
discover the Higgs—to prove its existence. But after two years
and 600 million collisions per second, the Higgs particle has
remained elusive. A data release yesterday presented the current
state of the search, with tantalizing results. Two detectors—the
ATLAS and the CMS—seem to have detected something although it
may or may not be the Higgs boson. After the near light-speed
collisions, the detectors record the (sometimes new) particles
and their decay. Scientific American explains: The experiments…
cannot directly detect the Hig