It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)
The story of the detection of the Higgs is a prime example of what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘normal science’ in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He said that most of the time, scientists are not seeking novelty but instead are carefully looking for things in which almost everything is known and anticipated, except for a few minor details. In the case of the Higgs, experimenters knew almost everything about it except its mass, and even then we had some idea of the possible range of values. It should not be surprising that the final confirmation comes as somewhat of an anti-climax. [Read more…]