“Maybe the Higgs boson is fictitious!”

That’s an intriguing and, as he remarks, plausible speculation by the noted condensed-matter physicist Philip Warren Anderson. It appears in a short article penned by him in Nature Physics on January 26, in which he discusses how the Higgs mechanism as in particle physics was inspired by a similar phenomenon observed in superconductors. According to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer …