THE most elusive particle in physics has skipped even further out of reach. Pinning down the Higgs boson, or proving that it does not exist, would be a huge step towards understanding why our universe has mass. But fresh predictions from Fermilab, home to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, have dashed hopes of achieving that goal for at least the next 6 years.
Current understanding of the universe is summarised in physicists’ standard model, but this lacks any explanation for why things have mass. The popular Higgs theory says that a gooey “Higgs field” pervades the universe and endows…
