An Artist’s Rendering Of The Higgs Boson

By: KC Ifeanyi

Commissioned by the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, artist Josef Kristofoletti creates a three-story mural of that goddamn particle you’ve been hearing so much about.

Decades of research and billions in spending recently culminated in a monster of a discovery that has the science community and media outlets, for lack of a better description, spazzing out--but who could blame them? CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced they may have found the ever-illusive Higgs boson particle that’s the crucial element to advancing our understanding of life in the universe. And in case you’re wondering where the groundbreaking roadwork took place to uncover the Higgs boson particle, just look for the three-story multicolored mural painted on the side of CERN’s Atlas control room in Geneva.
Created in 2010 by Austin-based artist Josef Kristofoletti, the massive rendering was a year-long collaborative effort between Kristofoletti and Atlas (one of the teams working at the Large Hadron Collider) to visualize this difficult-to-comprehend element of physics. See how it all came together in the time-lapse video below:


And here’s a little something extra for the layman seeking a better understanding of the Higgs boson from people who are actually qualified to speak on such things:




[Image: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni]