evidence: July 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest discoveries made at CERN, the international particle-physics research centre near Geneva, Switzerland: namely, weak neutral currents. The discovery, made by the Gargamelle experiment, provided key evidence that one of four known fundamental forces in nature, the weak interaction, is inextricably entwined with another, the more familiar force of electromagnetism. That finding opened a path of exploration that led, by way of numerous breakthroughs, to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 — and it is still revealing new and exciting perspectives today. [...] Happy birthday, Higgs boson! What we do and don’t know about the particle [...] Eventually, the last missing ingredient of the standard model was the Higgs boson. Experiments at LEP actively searched for the elusive particle, but it became clear that an even more powerful accelerator was needed to produce it. LEP operations ended in 2000, paving the way for the installation of a new proton–proton collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in the same tunnel. The discovery of the Higgs boson was famously announced in 2012 by two LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS. Again, its measured mass was in excellent agreement with predictions.