Café Scientifique with Roger Rusack, on "Forces of Nature: Particle Physics and the Discovery of the Higgs Boson" Recorded at the Bryant Lake Bowl on 10-16-12. Here is the description of the talk: "So we found the Higgs…but what does it mean? University of Minnesota physics professor Roger Rusack designed the electromagnetic calorimeter that helped detect the elusive Higgs particle for the first time this past July. Tonight, Professor Rusack will place this discovery in the context of major advances in physics over the last century, explaining how we currently understand the basic mechanisms of the physical world and addressing some intriguing questions that remain unanswered. From his unique insider’s perspective, Professor Rusack will describe the whole enterprise of finding the Higgs – from the technical challenges to the complex sociology of international science – and lead a discussion of what it means to have found a particle predicted in theory some forty years ago. Why is it important today? Professor Rusack has been a member of the UM faculty since 1993 and since graduate school has been working in the field of High Energy Particle Physics. Born in London, educated at Liverpool University and Imperial College London, he did his graduate work at the Fermi National Accelerator near Chicago. Equipped with a PhD he joined Columbia University working with Professor Leon Lederman (Nobel Prize 1988) on measurements to probe the new ideas of quantum chromodynamics. Later moving to Rockefeller University he worked at CERN measuring the internal structure of the proton. He returned to the US in 1988 (in his own 34' sailing boat) to work on the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), to design and build an experiment that could find the Higgs and other new physics that might be accessible at the highest energies. Professor Rusack was part of the team that designed and built the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a scaled down version of the SSC, at CERN. The fruition of this effort was the observation this year of the Higgs, or a Higgs-like particle, in data collected at an energy of 8 tera-electron volts."