Introduction

The book’s theme is given by an answer to the question about what physics is: to figure out the world and build the instruments to help with the figuring. By focusing on the press conference at CERN where the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced, the link between the figuring (Higgs boson as last puzzle bit of the standard model) and the instruments (the large hadron collider and the detectors) is firmly established. The way physics works is briefly explained in describing ’unification’ as a way to distill experiments into physical laws.