By almost all measures, the Higgs Symposium at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, was a great success. The only negative was that Professor Peter Higgs himself had a bad cold this week, and had to cancel his talk, as well as missing the majority of the talks by others. Obviously all of us in attendance were very disappointed not to hear directly from him, and we wish him a speedy recovery.
Other than this big hole in the schedule, the talks given at the symposium seemed to me to form a coherent summary of where we are right now in our understanding of the Higgs field and particle. They were full of interesting material, and wonderfully complementary to one another. This motivates me to try to provide, for non-experts, some future articles on what the conference attendees had to say. But to write such articles well takes time. So for now, here’s the quick version summarizing the last few talks, along the lines of the summaries I wrote (here and here) of the earlier talks. The slides from all the talks are posted here.
Here we go: