Where does the Large Hadron Collider fit in?
Discoveries about subatomic particles are made using devices that smash up atoms and examine the resulting subatomic debris. In 1932, Cambridge University scientists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton first split the atom, using a particle accelerator to fire protons into lithium atoms, producing helium. Since then, bigger and better atom-smashers have confirmed the existence of a whole world of mysterious, and mysteriously named, particles such as the W and Z boson, the charm quark, and the top quark. But earlier colliders are peashooters compared with the LHC. So what could it discover? The holy grail is the Higgs boson, named after Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs. He proposed its existence in 1964 as a solution to the mystery of why matter has mass, and thus exists in a form that allows it to make planets and people, while some phenomena—such as light—do not. Higgs theorized that the universe is pervaded by an invisible, molasses-like field of bosons (the Higgs field). As particles mo
