Nature’s secrets foretold

Higgs discovery celebrates math’s power to make predictions about the real world

By now, all aficionados of physics news — and quite a few people who don’t know physics from phonics — have heard about the discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s the biggest news in physics ever tweeted. And it came after a long wait. For more than three decades, the Higgs has been physicists’ version of King Arthur’s Holy Grail, Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick.