What Happens If We Find the Higgs Particle–or If We Don’t?

With instruments offering “tantalizing hints” in support of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle thought to endow matter with mass, we stand at a singular moment in time for physics. Will we get sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of the Higgs, thus helping to complete the decades-old Standard Model? Will science have to go back to the drawing board? Or something in between? On April 18, 2012, I participated in a panel at Columbia University to probe such mysteries, called “What If We Find the Higgs Particle and What If We Don’t?”