Discovery of the Higgs Boson as much a cultural as a scientific advance

In the early 1980s, the US decided to build a massive particle accelerator which was called - with typical American excess - the Superconducting Super Collider. During its early planning stages, the great machine was enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of US congressmen who each hoped the US$4.4 billion project would be based in his or her state, bringing jobs and prestige.

Waxahachie, near Dallas, Texas was eventually selected to be the SCC's home. Forty-nine out of the 50 state delegations in Congress promptly dropped their interest in the SSC, leaving it fighting for its life. The Nobel laureate (and SCC defender) Steven Weinberg subsequently appeared on radio with a congressman who wanted to stop the project. "I explained that the collider was going to help us learn the laws of nature and asked if that didn't deserve a high priority," Weinberg recalls. "I remember every word of his answer. It was 'No'."

A few months later the SSC was cancelled and so Europe took over responsibility for the next-generation collider that physicists said they needed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - built at the laboratories of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva - began operations in 2009 when scientists started smashing beams of protons into each other to seek new subatomic entities in the debris. Three years later, they found the Higgs boson, the fabled particle responsible for giving mass to objects. Peter Higgs, a Briton, and the Belgian Francois Englert, who first proposed the particle's existence, subsequently shared the 2013 Nobel prize for physics.

Crucially, the LHC probably has another 20 years of use and further glories can be anticipated - though in a new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs and the Discovery of a New World, physicist Sean Carroll makes it clear that these are unlikely to bring wealth or vast industrial returns. We construct machines such as the LHC, and try to uncover the building blocks of the cosmos, primarily as cultural exercises, he argues.

"Basic science might not lead to immediate improvements in national defence or a cure for cancer but it enriches our lives by teaching us something about the universe of which were are a part," he tells us. "That should be a very high priority indeed."

It is a fair point, though it begs the simple question: just what have we learned from the billions of euros we have invested in particle physics? What cultural benefits have they brought? A great deal, says Carroll. We now know that subatomic particles come in two varieties: fermions that make up matter, and bosons that carry forces. The latter include gluons, photons, gravitons (which carry gravity) and of course the Higgs. The fermions include leptons such as the electron and quarks, of which there are six types: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. On top of that we have issues of symmetry, force fields and wave functions.