FOR years, particle physicists at the powerful colliders of CERN and Fermilab have been searching for an unimaginably small and fleeting speck of matter called the Higgs boson – and failing to find it even though their calculations said they should. Should we care? Absolutely. The Higgs is predicted to give other particles their mass, and is therefore the keystone of particle physics – the so-called “God particle”. What is more, large sums of public money have been sunk into the hunt.
So why is it proving so elusive? It now seems that the calculations of where in the spectrum of mass…
