NOVA · Season 42 · Episode 11

“Big Bang Machine”

Aired Thursday 15 January 2015

On July 4, 2012, scientists at the giant atom-smashing facility at CERN announced the discovery of a subatomic particle that seems like a tantalizingly close match to the elusive Higgs Boson, thought to be responsible for giving all the stuff in the universe its mass. Since it was first proposed nearly fifty years ago, the Higgs has been the holy grail of particle physicists: in finding it they validate the "standard model" that underlies all of modern physics and open the door to new discoveries when CERN's Large Hadron Collider switches on at higher power in 2015.

S42 E11 discussion