The particle that we now call the Higgs boson first appeared in a scientific paper written by Peter Higgs in 1964. At that time, physicists were working on describing the weak force – one of the four fundamental forces of Nature – using a framework called quantum field theory.

In 1964, several researchers, including British physicist Peter Higgs, found a clever solution to a troubling problem in theoretical physics. The problem was that at high energies, two of the forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, merge together into a single force.