Physicist Joe Incandela, AB’81, SM’85, PhD’86, seems like an easygoing guy, but the pressure of leading the final stages of the Higgs boson discovery—and presenting the results to the world—left him a little on edge. As chief scientist for one of the two Large Hadron Collider experiments that uncovered the Higgs, Incandela understands more than the esoteric science confirming the long-held theory of why particles have mass. He knows the time, talent, and investment—five decades, thousands of people, and billions of dollars—necessary to pull off the discovery, and the immeasurable value of the knowledge itself. “This is a major advance for humanity, actually, to dig in that deep,” he says. “It’s pretty profound.” Most of us could grasp the significance on, at best, that abstract level—the Higgs as another piece in the vast, imponderable puzzle of the universe. There were no astronaut boot prints on the moon to make the achievement tangible to untrained eyes. Even the thousands of physicists who spent decades in the search have never observed a Higgs boson, only the fragments they believe it decays into when particles collide. The existence of the Higgs is best represented by a tiny indentation on a graph, resembling a curve on a road map. “Look at that little bump,” Incandela says, recounting a story he heard about a dismissive government minister’s reaction to the discovery. “Is that worth $10 billion?” Although awe and applause dominated the global reaction to his July 4 presentation documenting the Higgs discovery, Incandela had heard enough of that cavalier skepticism to become defensive. A Thai journalist’s jesting question finally pushed him over the edge. Describing his response a week after the fact, lingering exasperation spills through a lighthearted retelling. “The guy sort of jokingly said, ‘Four thousand physicists? Did it really take 4,000 physicists?’ This is when I got kind of annoyed. I said, ‘OK, look. We built a device that’s five-stories tall.’ I was tired, this just set me off. ‘It weighs twice the mass of the Eiffel Tower. Imagine building something that has 100 million channels of electronics, all of which are synchronized to one billionth of a second. Now imagine you know the position of everything in this thing to one-fifth the diameter of a human hair. Imagine building a building. How many people would it require—ten, 100? Now, wait. This thing will take a three-dimensional photograph, the highest position of any camera in the world. Not only that, it can do 40 million photographs per second. Now how many people do you think it would take to build something like that—1,000? You’d expect maybe even 10,000, but we did it with 4,000.’ He’s like, ‘OK, you convinced me.’” Incandela has never needed convincing. Inspired as a teenager when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and an artist at heart, he has always been a scientist with wide eyes, understanding the universe both in physics calculations and as a metaphor for human aspiration. In the spirit of a limitless thirst for knowledge, he believes that great scientific quests, in and of themselves, serve as cultural bellwethers. “It kind of tells us we’re still on track somehow,” Incandela says. “I think when you start losing the front edge and it’s just a matter of maintenance, then you have a civilization that’s in trouble.”