Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs bosons imbues other elementary particles with mass, making them slow down enough to assemble into atoms, which then clump together to make everything else.

A couple of months later, I took a job as the first staff reporter at the nascent science magazine that would become Quanta. Turns out I was starting on the physics beat just as the drama was picking up.

The drama wasn’t about the Higgs particle; by the time it materialized at the LHC there was already little doubt about its existence. The Higgs was the last piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, the 1970s-era set of equations governing the 25 known elementary particles and their interactions.

More striking was what did not emerge from the data.

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