The . . . Enchanted Forest?

The laboratory I work in is located in a rather remote area compared to the rest of the university and the center of the city.  Considering the offices and departments located here, I suspect that the campus was organized to house anything to do with the words "nuclear," "radiation," or "particle" in the last forty years.  It is a quiet campus, and a decent walk from the nearest bus stop.

With all the rain that Belgium gets as part of its normal fall weather, I was not surprised to see lots of mushrooms and moss popping up outside the laboratory.  I was surprised to see this one, though:

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physis: The Theory

October this year brought rain and a Nobel prize to Belgium, as Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels won the 2013 physics prize along with Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh.  They were recognized for  “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”[1].  I think my field is witnessing the end of an era.

The first subatomic particle discovered as such was the electron in 1895, and in the following decades many, many more particles were discovered, including protons, neutrons, muons, pions, and neutrinos.  Different ways by which particles interact were also identified.  As the list of particles got larger, patterns in their properties and behavior began to emerge.  Theorists began to look for theories that explained these patterns.  Quark theory was the answer to describing all the hadrons, while the description of how particles interacted was built by Sheldon Glashow in 1960.