On a Sunday morning early in January, about two dozen prominent
physicists gathered behind closed doors at the California
Institute of Technology to ponder the state of their craft.
American physicists were not exactly sitting on the sidelines
last July when CERN announced the probable discovery of the
long-sought Higgs boson, the key to understanding the origin of
mass and life in the universe. The United States contributed
$531 million to building and equipping the Large Hadron
Collider, the multibillion-dollar European machine with which
the discovery was made. About 1,200 Americans work at CERN,
including Joe Incandela from the University of California, Santa
Barbara, who led one of the two teams making the July
announcement. But as science goes forward, American particle
physicists are wondering what role, if any, they will play in
the future in high-energy physics — the search for the
fundamental particles and forces of nature — a field they once
dominated. “There is enormous angst in the field,” said M