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For decades, particle physicists have searched for the elusive Higgs boson, the missing piece to the "Standard Model" that explains the world we see. In July 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced that they found it. I will explain why the Higgs boson is so important, talk about the enormous challenge physicists overcame to build the LHC and get it running, and consider what the future of particle physics will look like.
Sean Carroll is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on theoretical physics and cosmology, especially the origin and constituents of the universe. He has contributed to models of interactions between dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter; alternative theories of gravity; and violations of fundamental symmetries. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity, and the forthcoming The Particle at the End of the Universe.
He has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report (November 29, 2012 and March 10, 2010) and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette. His website: preposterousuniverse.com
