   The audience roared and champagne glasses clinked. Peter
Higgs, the 83 year-old theorist who first dreamed up the
particle in 1964 (as did, independently, five other physicists)
turned misty-eyed as the moment's significance set in. Glaring
out amid the piles of data recorded from hundreds of trillions
of collisions between protons whizzing in opposite directions at
nearly the speed of light around CERN's Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) was a fundamental building block of nature. Humans had,
once again, peeled another layer from the surface of reality.
But no party lasts forever. In the week following the
announcement, a hangover set in. Some worried that the Higgs
discovery heralds the end of an era in experimental high-energy
physics. The LHC was billed as a machine to nab the Higgs. If
the new particle turns out to quack like the boson (it already
looks and swims like one), where will the world's biggest and
most expensive experiment go from here? Are its best days behind
it?  Big, era-defining discoveries