The Higgs Boson has finally made an appearance on stage at the LHC (large hadron collider)! Looks like the fireworks are in Europe this 4th of July.  The last element of the standard model has been empirically confirmed leaving us with 12 constituent particles, 4 forces, and the Higgs boson for mass (not shown) to predict most of what we see in the observable universe.

Back in 1995 I had the good fortune to be sitting in the class of astrophysicist Alan Guth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Guth), co-inventor of Inflationary model of the Big Bang which explained the uniformity of the cosmic background radiation discovered by physicists Penzias (now at NEA!) and Wilson.   Continue reading “Debut of the Higgs” →