In the next few months, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern may detect one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe: the elusive Higgs boson. The collider, one of the most ambitious machines ever built—which sends two beams of subatomic particles around an underground circuit 27km in circumference, to crash into each other at close to the speed of light—may already have given them the crucial data. The Swiss government asks Cern, the joint European research institution, to shut down the circuit in winter, to spare it the demand on the electricity grid; these cold months are used for analysing the torrent of data from the summer’s experiments. If scientists find the Higgs boson, then it will be one of the greatest advances ever in physics. The world’s attention—including that of the Nobel committee, will turn to, among others, Peter Higgs, 82, emeritus professor at the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. But if they don’t find the particle, the consequences could be even more interesting—as Peter Higgs explains in this interview for Prospect. The particle that he has argued must exist “plays such a role” in the modern theory of the structure of the physical world “that if you tried to modify the theory to take it out, the whole thing becomes nonsense.”
more from James Elwes at Prospect Magazine here.