The woman who broke parity

(Mesons are now known to be made up of quarks, the interactions of which, through the exchange of gluons, are the basis of this force.) In December 1947, George Rochester and Clifford Butler at the University of Manchester, UK, took the meson discovery a stage further. By 1955,35 more events had been produced using the Bevatron, an enormous particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, that provided an alternative source, beyond cosmic rays, of high-energy particles. [...]in April 1956, particle physicists gathered at a conference in Rochester, New York, to thrash out exactly what was going on with kaons, and several other confusing 'strange' particles that had been discovered in the meantime. Spontaneous symmetry breaking suggested the existence of the Higgs boson - a particle eventually discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.