Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland announced that they had verified the existence of the long-sought after Higgs Boson (or at least a “Higgs-like particle”), ending a forty-year series of efforts and adding a new bit of experimental confirmation to the Standard Model, the theoretical framework of the universe currently in vogue.
Alongside the jubilation are numerous wistful Texas might have beens: the Superconducting Supercollider, half-built near Waxahachee, TX and three times as powerful as the CERN installation that made the discovery, might have found the Higgs particle ten years ago, but was abandoned in 1993 when Congress cut its funding.
