In conjunction with the IFF’s current exhibition making space, we are delighted to present a talk by Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll on the Higgs boson and the relationship between matter and space.For decades, particle physicists have searched for the elusive Higgs boson, the missing piece to the “Standard Model” that explains the foundations of matter, energy and force in the physical world. In July 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced that they had found this enigmatic particle, which they believe is responsible for giving matter its mass. In this talk, renowned speaker Sean Carroll will explain what the Higgs boson means; why it – quite literally – matters; and how, in contemporary physics, matter is ultimately a byproduct of space itself.

Sean Carroll is a physicist at the Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at the California Institute of Technology. An expert on dark matter, Carroll lectures widely about contemporary physics at universities and colleges the world over. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here, a book about physicists’ understanding of time, and The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson and the Future of Physics, on which his IFF talk is based. He is currently working with PBS’s NOVA on a documentary version of the book. Carroll blogs about physics at his widely-read and well-respected site, Preposterous Universe.

Image by Sean Carroll.