Reacción a "Ten years since the discovery of the Higgs boson: how it changed the history of physics"

The discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva is as important for physics as the discovery of DNA in biology or the discovery of atomic and molecular structure in chemistry. From a technological point of view, it is a milestone comparable to the arrival of man on the moon, but its scientific repercussions are far greater.

A theoretical hypothesis, formulated in 1964 in order to understand the origin of the masses of the elementary constituents of matter, was confirmed 48 years later as a tangible ingredient of the real world: a new force field, imperceptible and enigmatic, which holds valuable secrets about some of the most burning questions in fundamental physics today: the replication in families of the elementary constituents of matter, the great disparity of their masses, the virtual absence of antimatter in the universe, the existence of dark matter, and so on.

The Higgs field raises many questions, but we still lack the right answers. In the coming days, the LHC will begin a new period of experimentation to scrutinise the new force field more precisely. A new and exciting stage of scientific research is beginning, and we hope that it will hold some big surprises.