The Particle at the End of the Universe

Summary

A physicist's account of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN, written for readers without a technical background in particle physics. Carroll explains why the Higgs field gives other particles their mass, how the Large Hadron Collider was designed to find it, and what its detection means for the Standard Model. The narrative blends physics, engineering, and the human politics of big science to convey why a single subatomic particle merited decades of global effort.