By Andrew Grant
At 5 a.m. last Fourth of July, Flip Tanedo rolled out of bed after an hour of repeatedly smacking his alarm clock’s snooze button. Rousting himself at dawn would be worth it, he hoped, because what he was about to hear was likely to have a huge bearing on the course of his career.
Tanedo, a fifth-year theoretical physics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, tuned in to a live video feed from Geneva and listened intently as physicists working with the world’s largest particle accelerator discussed a momentous discovery. Data from the Large Hadron Collider revealed what looked very much like the long-sought Higgs boson. The product of a decades-long effort by thousands of physicists, the discovery solidified the leading theory of particle physics, the standard model. The Higgs particle confirmed the existence of a field that permeates the universe, imparting certain subatomic particles with mass while letting photons and other massless particles pass unimpeded.