Why the Higgs Boson Matters

The July 4 announcement that the “Higgs boson” had been discovered at the CERN laboratory in Geneva made news around the world. Why all the fuss? New discoveries of elementary particles have been made from time to time without attracting all this attention. It is often said that this particle provides the crucial clue to how all the other elementary particles get their masses. True enough, but this takes some explanation.

Glow in the dark

LAST week scientists at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics lab, finally ran the Higgs boson to ground. The discovery of the Higgs, whose existence was first predicted in 1964, is a powerful demonstration of the predictive powers of the Standard Model of particle physics. But other scientists have powerful theories of their own, even if they get less press than particle physicists do. A paper just published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reports another predictive triumph, this time for astronomers.