Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?

Introduction In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs bosons imbues other elementary particles with mass, making them slow down enough to assemble into atoms, which then clump together to make everything else. A couple of months later, I took a job as the first staff reporter at the nascent science magazine that would become Quanta. Turns..