A Palette of Particles
Some elementary particles arrived like unexpected and, sometimes, unwanted guests
During the past century, theorists predicted the existence of some subatomic particles, but not all. Physicist and author Jeremy Bernstein describes the intellectual journeys that researchers took to understand observed anomalies that led to their quests to find the neutrino, the pi meson, the antiproton, the quark and the Higgs boson. Along the way, the needed tools grew in power and in scale. These instruments now include the Large Hadron Collider, the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, where researchers may be narrowing in on the Higgs boson.
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