The New Year may also be a year of discoveries for physicists plumbing the deepest mysteries of matter. Since 2013, when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed they had discovered the Higgs boson, the particle that lends others mass, physics has been in a kind of limbo. The Higgs was the last missing puzzle piece in the Standard Model, the reigning model to explain the behavior of tiny particles. And yet, key questions about the universe still remained unanswered.
