How a Physicist Who Helped Find the Higgs Boson Got Into Horse Apps

Long before the public learned that the Large Hadron Collider had unearthed the Higgs boson, physicists like Matt Hollingsworth knew it was coming. They had seen hints in the data: First, a small, statistically dubious bump where the subatomic particle--the one that explains why everything in the universe has mass--should be. Then, the bump began to grow. Every day, some employees would religiously check an internal website that charted the growth of the signal, the probability that it was real. Before breaking out the champagne, they needed to reach three-sigma--or 99.7 percent certainty.