How the Higgs Boson Was Found
How the Higgs Boson Was Found Before the elusive particle could be discovered—a smashing success—it had to be imagined image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/Higgs-boson-ATLAS-detector-631.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg The ATLAS detector, one of two experiments to spot the elusive Higgs boson in particle smashups at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, weighs as much as a hundred 747 jets and houses more than 1,800 miles of cable. (Claudia Marcelloni / CERN) By Brian Greene SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE JULY 2013 500 43 17 41 73 31 6.1K 500 43 41 73 17 6.1K Editor's note: On October 8, 2013, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the Higgs boson. Below, our science columnist Brian Greene explains the science behind the discovery. A famous story in the annals of physics tells of a 5-year-old Albert Einstein, sick in bed, receiving a toy compass from his father. The boy was both puzzled and mes