Is the imperative of the two most powerful particle accelerators ever built—the Tevatron at Fermilab, now reaching the peak of its decades-long performance, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where beams will circulate for the first time around a 27-km track within the next few months. The Higgs has not yet been discovered, but at this week’s meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in St. Louis dozens of talks referred to the status of the Higgs search. Why is the Higgs so important? Because it is thought to pervade the universal vacuum; not, as with the old aether, to provide a material substrate for the propagation of electromagnetic waves, but rather to interact with particles and confer mass upon them.
