The Story of the Higgs Boson, as Told by Higgs Himself

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In the run-up to the premiere of NOVA’s The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, PBS is releasing sneak peaks of the series. In this clip, as our friends at Scientific American point out, Peter Higgs explains the origins of the hypothetical elementary particle that could help explain how matter was created.

Physicists have long thought that the Higgs particle should exist but have yet to find it. With the aid of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the elusive Higgs boson may finally come out of hiding. In the clip, Higgs, now an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, tells of his nerve-racking 1964 presentation at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., when his ideas still ran counter to conventional wisdom. Also featured in the video are physicists Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University.