Higgs Boson Born of Physicists’ Love of Metaphor: Mark Buchanan

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- It’s an iconic image: the professorof physics, wild hair, Einstein-like, standing before achalkboard covered with arcane equations. It could be Einsteinhimself, the scribbled mathematics describing his theory ofrelativity and the link between mass and energy, E=MC2.

Or, later, Paul Dirac, the English physicist who, seekingmathematical elegance, forged bonds between Einstein’srelativity and the quantum theory, and set the stage for physicstoday.