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Lex Fridman Podcast · 3 min instead of 2 h 54 m · May 29, 2026

Why Fermilab narrowly missed the Higgs discovery to CERN

DL

Don Lincoln

Particle Physicist, Fermilab

  • Lex FridmanHost · Host, Lex Fridman Podcast

    Robotics and AI researcher at MIT; started the show in 2018.

About this segment

Lincoln describes the Higgs hunt from the Fermilab side, with scientists wearing both Fermilab and CERN hats. The LHC had more collisions and energy, so the outcome was close to inevitable.

From “Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE - Don Lincoln | Lex Fridman Podcast #497”, May 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

“Both accelerators could either find it or definitively rule out the predictions of simple Higgs theory. 100% guaranteed.”
DLDon Lincolnat 1:04:22 · Lex Fridman Podcast1:04:22

Takeaways

  1. Fermilab needed two or three more years of data to find the Higgs
  2. LHC had ten times the collisions and 3.5 times the energy
  3. Two days before CERN's announcement Fermilab still could not rule out the Higgs
Watch 3:11 from 1:04:14

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:21:37Why a theory of everything is probably far off and string theory likely wrong6:20
  2. 1:55:44Making one gram of antimatter would take a billion years2:30

  3. 1:04:14Why Fermilab narrowly missed the Higgs discovery to CERN3:11

Up next · Unsupervised LearningA world model predicts consequences, which LLMs cannot do3:12

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:04:21

    see it there? No. Then it's not 100. Well, let's look at 103. Is it there? No. So we could do that. Both accelerators could either find it or definitively rule out the predictions of simple Higgs theory. 100% guaranteed. However, the CERN accelerator had 10 times the collisions per second and three and a half times the energy. So remember when I said with the top quarks, it was like six months for 19 versus one a second. There's no question. The writing is on the wall. The LHC was going to have an easier time of it if it was real. However, so, but you know, I'm a Fermilab scientist and we wanted Fermilab, you know, come on, we want Fermilab the wind. So we were busting our butt and we had done what I said. We had ruled out this region.

  2. 1:05:18

    We had certain mass ranges. We knew it wasn't there. And we finally said, if there was a Higgs boson, if it existed, which we didn't know at the time, its mass was somewhere between, if I recall, between like 120 and 145. All right. We'd ruled out all the other stuff. And so wearing our CERN have, we said, okay, we're going to find that. But we were really, really, really trying to do it. Now, if we had had another two years or maybe three years of running the Fermi accelerator, Fermilab would have discovered or ruled out, or in this case, turned out, discovered the Higgs boson because it's a real thing. We would have found it without a question, but we didn't have enough data in July of 2012.

  3. 1:06:07

    We needed a couple more years. Unfortunately, in 2008, fortunately, the LHC had turned on. It broke. They had to fix it. Turned on again in 2010. It ran poorly in 2011. In 2012, they pushed up their sleeves and said, let's do this. And it turned on. And so, you know, there was this, the Fermilab knew if it didn't have it now, it wasn't, it was too late. Anyways, come 2012 rolls around and like two days before the announcement at CERN was July 4th. So two days before that, Fermilab made a measurement and said, we can rule out certain regions, but certain regions we can't rule out. But what we know and this is important if the higgs boson exists it must be in this region for which we are not capable yet of ruling out so that's where we were two days before the lhc said we got it that was uh july 4th 2012 so detecting the higgs boson confirmed the existence of the