It feels like a personal thing – like we are relating to something very special. But they were certainly using the word to express the intimate relationship between the human mind and the glorious intelligibility of the universe. The situation is extreme enough for greats such as Einstein and Hawking to invoke God. We believe that these are universal rules that would also be uncovered by sufficiently intelligent aliens on a distant planet: we are discovering something at the heart of things. To spend time contemplating this is thrilling. This is not titillation and it is not a conceit of the human mind – it leaves everyone who has studied these things with an overwhelming sense that the natural world operates according to some beautiful rules and that we are very fortunate to be able to appreciate them. Before doing that let's be clear – this is a kind of life-changing beauty.
But it is possible to get the gist of what a physicist means when they speak of a beautiful theory without the hard work. Examples include Einstein's equation of general relativity, Dirac's equation for the electron and the Lagrangian at the heart of the standard model of particle physics. The best way to appreciate the beauty of a discovery is to get stuck in, learn some mathematics and see those dazzling equations in all their glory. This is all very important – but why? Why is the discovery of a new type of particle something to get so excited about?
Answers to those questions and to many others will follow over the coming months and years. We aren't certain, though: more careful examination of the particle's properties is needed before we can be – we want to know that it has spin zero and that it couples to other particles with a strength that is in proportion to their mass. Discovering new particles of nature is not an everyday occurrence and we are reasonably entitled to proclaim that this is the arrival of the Higgs. T he dust is beginning to settle – a new particle has been discovered using the Large Hadron Collider.
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