VIDEO
Been there, got the Higgs T shirt. Now Cern scientists seek invisible dark matter
How does Dr Sam Harper, particle physicist, feel about the greatest discovery in particle physics in half a century? Well, frankly, Higgs schmiggs.
“I was quite blasé,” he says in one of the control rooms at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva. “To me, finding it was a bit boring.” The problem was, he explains, they expected it.
After Cern’s most successful year — in which it finally discovered the Higgs boson, which gives other particles mass — Dr Harper, like many physicists, hopes for more. An extra dimension, perhaps, or, he explains, a Pringle-shaped universe. Even the unification of some forces would be nice.
“Whatever I know is boring,” he says. “I want to find something, look at it, and know nothing about