PHD Comics talks to particle physicist Daniel Whiteson for an exceptionally lucid explanation of the quest for the Higgs boson: what it is, and how the Large Hadron Collider of the  European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was able to observe it, albeit indirectly. If the predicted effect  [of the Higgs boson's existence] were huge, it would be very easy to tell the difference between "with Higgs boson" and "not with Higgs boson." The prediced effect is tiny, so it's really hard to see. What you need is a huge amount of data. You need to take a gillion collisions before you can...

07 July, 2012