Credit: Toni Albir/EPA/Shutterstock During a few weeks in the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, wrote two short papers outlining his ideas for a mechanism that could give mass to fundamental particles, the building blocks of the Universe. His aim was to rescue a theory that was mathematically appealing but ultimately unrealistic because the particles it described had no mass. The second paper drew attention to a measurable c...