The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs’ prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime. What did it mean for him when the particle was finally discovered?
He told me he felt relief that its existence was actually confirmed. In that moment he knew it [das Teilchen] really does exist, and he was deeply touched that nature is as his theory predicted – right afterward he panicked that his life was about to change.
Why was Higgs’ discovery so important?
Because we now know that mass is not something intrinsic to particles. It is a product of the entire cosmos. That’s because there’s a weird field out there that does that. The counter-intuitive aspect of this is that if the vacuum in space was made of absolutely nothing, it would be less stable than if you filled it with this mysterious stuff we call the Higgs field. It’s so counterintuitive that I wonder if that’s why it took so long for this idea to even come up. And now we also know that it’s true. Most people have heard of the electromagnetic field. Energizing an electromagnetic field can stimulate it to emit photons. Similarly, there is what we now call the Higgs field. If we supply enough energy to this field, we can in principle also excite it and generate Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson and the Higgs field are comparable to the photons and the electromagnetic field. Lighting a match, however, produces millions of photons, but to produce a single Higgs boson requires 125 billion electron volts to be concentrated in one spot. And that’s exactly what they did at the LHC. That’s why we’ve known about photons for 100 years and only recently found the Higgs boson.