Web edition: October 20, 2009 Soon physicists at the world’s
most powerful particle accelerator will exhale — when beams of
protons there finally begin to collide, even though those
collisions will not at first be as violent as originally
planned. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva
remain confident, though, that the collisions will eventually
attain sufficient energy to produce the Higgs boson, says Nobel
laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin.
As Weinberg recounted to science writers attending the Council
for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual symposium on
October 19, the Higgs would be the crowning achievement of the
standard model of particle physics, the equations that precisely
describe the known particles of matter and three of nature’s
fundamental forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces and
electromagnetism. In the most basic version of the standard
model, elementary particles such as electrons and quarks have no
reason to possess any mass. But cle