The Talk
All universe is made of matter and energy. Matter is made of fundamental particles, which are of two kinds. One set called Fermions (named after Enrico Fermi) and the other Bosons (after Satyen Bose). Fermions make up all the particles that make atomic and nuclear matter. Bosons provide the forces that allow fermions to interact. One such boson, suggested by Peter Higgs, is supposed to provide all these particles with mass. All this while, it was elusive, and hence the enormous effort to detect it. On 12th July 2012 CERN, the European high energy physics laboratory in Geneva, announced the discovery of a new elementary particle which would be a candidate for the Higgs boson. If so this would fill an important gap in our quest to understand the fundamental theory of all matter in the universe. The Higgs boson discovery is exciting because it is the last piece of the jigsaw that helps us understand the `visible’ matter around us. In this talk we discussed the story of the `Higgs’ which began almost half a century ago and the implications of its discovery for the further understanding of our universe.
PS : This talk has no video.