Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

An award-winning physicist who led the historic hunt for the God Particle offers “an excellent, accessible guide to one of science’s greatest discoveries” (The Sunday Times).

An Observer Top Ten Science and Technology Book

Our understanding of the universe hinges on a baffling question: how does a sea of tiny, massless particles acquire mass? The answer, in theory, is a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Sometimes called the God Particle, the Higgs is the missing link between the birth of our universe and the tangible world we experience. But for more than fifty years, scientists wondered: Does the Higgs exist?

Physicist Jon Butterworth was at the frontlines of the hunt for the Higgs at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—perhaps the most ambitious experiment in history, conducted deep underground beneath the border of Switzerland and France, near Geneva. In Most Wanted Particle, Butterworth gives us a rare insider’s account of that exciting, uncertain time when life at the cutting edge of science meant media scrutiny, late-night pub debates, dispiriting false starts, and countless hours at the collider itself. As Butterworth explains, our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs brings us a giant step closer to understanding the universe—and points the way to an entirely new kind of physics.

“A vivid account of what the process of discovery was really like for an insider.” —Peter Higgs