Bamboozled by the boson I attended Professor Melissa Franklin's talk as a non-scientist hoping for insight and enlightenment and came away with much more than a rudimentary understanding of experimental particle physics. Professor Franklin's lecture was humorously subtitled “one experimentalist's life of uncertainty" and this set the tone for this talk in which she was charming, interesting, self-deprecating and dismissive in her delivery of what could have been a very dry topic.

The audience were initially regaled with tales of Professor Franklin's childhood; particularly her love of cowboys and the Wild West and we were all drawn into her analogy of a cowboy and an experimental physicist, both seeking new frontiers. She then extended this comparison to include Beckett's experiments in theatre where he sought to take everything out of life and examine what was left. This is what I think Professor Franklin felt her work entailed too as what you are left with when you have stripped everything away in the universe is an energy field – the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson is the particle through which the field continuously reacts with other particles. From my understanding, the Higgs Boson only exists for a minuscule fraction of time which makes it impossible to record but an excitation of the Higgs Field can be recorded and evidences the existence of the boson and this excitation is what scientists, including Professor Franklin, have been trying to create using the large hadron collider at Cern. They were seeking to create enough energy to excite the field and find the particles the Higgs Boson decays into.

As the audience had been subtly drawn into this complex experiment, the professor demonstrated her mettle and the reason why she is Harvard's first female tenured professor of physics, by explaining the physics behind the large hadron collider and the hunt for the elusive boson. Names were dropped and principles discussed – the role of Rutherford and his team at Manchester, Feynman and his scatter diagrams and Heisenberg. Interestingly here Professor Franklin did not quote his uncertainty principle but rather his statement that “science rests on experimentation … but science is rooted in conversation". Finally she championed Cern's new female Director General, Fabiola Gianotti.

And so we were back to frontiers. Having successfully evidenced the Higgs Boson Professor Franklin speculated on what was next – supersymmetry and sparticles which she felt might be found soon. My heart sank having gained some little insight into the Higgs Boson here was a whole new concept to get to grips with. However, if all experimental physicists are as eloquent, insightful and humorous as Professor Franklin hopefully the learning curve will be shallower.