The discovery of the Higgs boson particle only takes us half way to replicating the extreme energy conditions of the Big Bang

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July 4th witnessed not just the celebration of American independence from the Brits, but the discovery of the Higgs boson, the herald of how beauty and order emerged from the chaotic debris of the Big Bang. Why is the universe full of huge, interesting structures of galaxies, stars and planets, with microscopic fabrics of atoms and molecules, rather than some disordered hotchpotch?

Our best theories had posited that the debris from the Big Bang was like goo: massless particles flitting around hither and thither at the speed of light. But this model of mathematical perfection is not the universe that you and I know; it is the plaything of theorists. In the real world of particles which have mass, these theories worked only in restricted cases. The moment