Tag Archives: particle

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Since the 1800s, energetic particles have probed the fundamental nature of matter. Rutherford’s gold foil experiment showed that the atom was mostly empty space, but that there was a concentration of mass at one point that …

Imagine a particle so elusive, so rare, that it’s difficult even to catch a glimpse of it. That’s the challenge researchers face when they try to study the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle—also called the God particle—responsible for giving mass to other particles.  However, recent breakthroughs by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN have begun to unlock some of its most …