  The particle recently discovered by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN
is almost certainly a Higgs boson, fulfilling a quest that can be traced back
to three seminal high energy papers of 1964, but which is intimately connected
to ideas in other areas of physics that go back much further. One might
oversimplify the history of the features which (i) give mass to the W and Z
particles that mediate the weak nuclear interaction, (ii) effectively break
gauge invariance, (iii) eliminate physically unacceptable Nambu-Goldstone
bosons, and (iv) give mass to fermions (like the electron) by collectively
calling them the
London-Anderson-Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble-Weinberg mechanism.
More important are the implications for the future: a Higgs boson appears to
point toward supersymmetry, since new physics is required to protect its mass
from enormous quantum corrections, while the discovery of neutrino masses seems
to point toward grand unification of the nongravitational forces.
