Hunting the Higgs boson

This event complements the Hunting the Higgs boson exhibition which runs from Fri 27 Sept 2013–Sun 16 February 2014 at the National Museum of Scotland.

Exhibition curator Tacye Phillipson is joined by Dr Victoria Martin from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics & Astronomy, part of the ATLAS team that found the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012. Together they explore the hunt for this elusive particle, which culminated in the recent award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs.

Doors open 13:40

Attendance is free.

Hunting the Higgs boson: exhibition

In July 2012 scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced to the world that they had found a particle that might be the Higgs boson.

This famous boson is named after Professor Peter Higgs, who proposed the theory behind its existence in 1964 while working at the University of Edinburgh. Scientists have been searching for this invisible particle since the mid-1990s. But how, and why, were they hunting the Higgs boson?

"It's about understanding! Understanding the world!" Peter Higgs, 2007

This small exhibition charts the search for the Higgs boson and the continuing quest to discover the fundamental structure of the universe.

Explore the ground-breaking work carried out at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory founded in 1954 to increase international scientific collaboration, and learn how the technology developed at CERN that helped find the Higgs boson has many real-world applications. The World Wide Web? It all started at CERN. See a selection of personal artefacts from Professor Peter Higgs, and glimpse the impact the Higgs boson has made on popular culture – even if we don’t all understand what it is…

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".

“National Museums Scotland are delighted that the work and achievements of Prof. Peter Higgs have been recognised with the Nobel Prize for Physics. We are very pleased to be able to share some of this remarkable story with our visitors through the current display, Hunting the Higgs boson, which explores the journey by scientists at CERN to pinpoint the Higgs boson particle and which includes items on loan from Professor Higgs himself.” Dr Gordon Rintoul, Director of National Museums Scotland