Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? | Quanta Magazine

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found any new physics. Now what?

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

Introduction

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs bosons imbues other elementary particles with mass, making them slow down enough to assemble into atoms, which then clump together to make everything else.