Exactly 10 years ago, Peter Higgs learned that the subatomic particle named after him had finally been found. He was in Sicily, enjoying lunch in a restaurant. Outside, the stone streets of Erice burned in the midday sun; inside, a Dutch film crew was making a documentary about the boson he had described in a two-page research paper nearly half a century earlier. With Higgs was Alan Walker, another physicist who, since retirement, had served as a kind of personal assistant.
Walker stepped away from the table to take a call. When he returned, he quietly told Higgs that it had been John Ellis, a senior theorist at Cern in Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. He was urging them to come to Geneva for an event billed as an “update” on the search for the boson. “If John Ellis says that, then we should go,” Higgs replied. Four days later, on 4 July 2012, Higgs was sitting in Cern’s main auditorium as scientists working on the collider’s massive detectors reported the discovery of the Higgs boson – a particle that exists for about one ten-thousandth of the time it takes for light to cross a single atom.
