Historical Predicted Discoveries

[rochvelleth]

100 Historical Things, Number 27

Well, yesterday we had the wonderful announcement that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered. Well, it needs confirming, but very probably. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964, and for me the best part of the reporting on the discovery was the clip of Peter Higgs looking so chuffed that it

Comments

[thymelady]

Excellent post! Can sadly not remember what theory I've been hoping for. All of them, LOL! When I hear about things like these, it's always wonderful.

[jagnikjen]

So exciting. :)

[ewx]

Not quite the same, but it’s always tickled me that people spent centuries (millennia, really) studying the properties of prime numbers, without any real application; and then suddenly in the 1970s people came up with a way of using those properties to keep secrets, and now they’re widely used for this every day.

[requiem_17_23]

ANTIMATTER.

The Dirac equation predicted antimatter before it was found. Dirac presented his paper, someone stood up* and said 'so, where is this antiparticle' and he basically muttered something about protons that nobody, not even him, believed. Then people discovered the positron.

I'm probably weird for finding that one cooler than the existence of a Higgs at 125 to 126 GeV (my reaction was roughly Hawking's of 'Aww? Really? Damn,' although I didn't bet a hundred quid on it.)

*may not have happened this way, objects in history may be further away than they appear

[requiem_17_23]

A Higgs boson scatters in to a Catholic church.

The priest says "We don't allow Higgs bosons in here."

The boson says "You have to. Without me you can't have mass."