Higgs boson.

The biggest news in particle physics is no news. In March, one of the most important conferences in the field, Rencontres de Moriond, took place. It is an annual meeting at which experimental collaborations present preliminary results. But the recent data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently the world’s largest particle collider, has not revealed anything new.

Forty years ago, particle physicists thought themselves close to a final theory for the structure of matter. At that time, they formulated the Standard Model of particle physics to describe the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions. After that, they searched for the predicted, but still missing, particles of the Standard Model. In 2012, they confirmed the last missing particle, the Higgs boson.

How nature works

Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to the simplest levels imaginable. The macroscopic world is composed of particles that are — if you divide them until they can be divided no more — fundamental. They experience forces that are determined by the exchange of additional particles (or the curvature of spacetime, for gravity), and react to the presence of objects around them.