SHIFTHEADS: Why the Large Hadron Collider Is Shutting Down (For Now)

The Large Hadron Collider is going dark, and it is not the ending it sounds like. Dr. Samantha Yammine walks through what a decade-old Higgs boson discovery has to do with the way your own brain gets imaged, and why a planned shutdown is actually a four-year upgrade. The Higgs boson never shows up directly in a detector. Scientists infer it from what is missing in a collision, then compare that to a theory first proposed in the 1960s, decades before anyone could test it. Yammine connects the physics back to her own field, tracing how tools built for particle detection at CERN now show up in medical imaging used on the brain, and makes the case for staying curious about science at any level. Topics: Large Hadron Collider, Higgs boson, particle physics, brain imaging, CERN GUEST: Samantha Yammine | http://samanthayammine.com | @‌science.sam Originally aired on 2026-07-17