AS celebrities go, the Higgs boson is an unlikely character. For one thing it is an unimaginably tiny and fleeting speck of matter. For another, its existence is purely theoretical. Yet celebrity it is.
In the mid-1990s, Britain’s then science minister William Waldegrave offered a bottle of champagne to those who could best explain the Higgs to him. At about the same time, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman immortalised it in the title of his book The God Particle.
The attraction of this elusive beast stems from its role in explaining one of nature’s deepest mysteries: why subatomic particles have mass.…
