Hunting the Higgs Boson Particle

Why is the photon massless? Why is the top quark as heavy as 175 protons? How can electromagnetic phenomena and radioactive decay be due to the same force? Physicists on the new ATLAS experiment hope to answer these questions and more with the discovery of the elusive Higgs Bison, the Holy Grail of particle physics for over forty years. The ATLAS experiment is performed at the world's highest energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. In this talk, I will first discuss the motivation for postulating the Higgs Boson. I will then describe the LHC and the ATLAS experiment and explain how the Higgs Boson could be detected, giving you a flavor of the challenges and rewards of "big science" along the way.