BATAVIA, ILL. — Not since Shakespeare has there been so much ado about nothing:
The production involves billions of dollars, thousands of physicists, two of the world's largest scientific laboratories and dozens of miles of racetracks for subatomic particles cruising at 99.9999% of the speed of light.
The star players are particle detectors the size of shopping malls--each with millions of channels of electronics hardened to military specifications, every connection custom-made and hand-wrought by groups of graduate students from Iowa to Minsk.
The stakes don't get any higher. "I've only been obsessed about it for 20 years," said physicist Chris Quigg of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, outside Chicago.
The focus of all this brain and brawn is a particle known as the Higgs--a crucial piece of the underlying structure responsible for making the universe what it is today. Without this structure--the so-called Higgs field--the universe would still be as it was in the beginning of time, a featureless mist of particles and forces--everything the same, no gravity, no electricity, no quarks or atoms or stars.
Physicists believe the Higgs field shattered this primordial sameness by, in effect, freezing the mist into the vacuum that supports our universe today. It's the Higgs that gives structure to the vacuum--what people normally think of as "nothing." Without that structure, nothing else would exist. The vacuum is a nothing that determines everything.
The problem is that no one has seen hard evidence that the Higgs really exists. If it does, physicists should be able to knock loose a chunk of it in powerful collisions of subatomic particles.
So far, they haven't succeeded. Until they do, the Higgs exists only in theory--leaving a gaping hole in the standard model of particle physics.
To find this elusive missing piece, Fermilab is locked in a fierce struggle with its European counterpart, the nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland, known as CERN.
It's a chance, Quigg said, to be the first to peer inside nature's head. "There is no finer moment than the moment you understand something before anybody else does," he said.
The competition to find the Higgs is almost uncannily like the fight over the presidency, physicists say. Both will ultimately turn on statistics; both have no clear end; both winners will reap enormous payoffs.
