If you run a wet fingertip around the edge of a wine glass, the glass will ring with a pure, ethereal tone. Do this repeatedly, and you’ll always hear the same sound.

Why is this? Your eardrums are vibrating thanks to the push and pull of rhythmic sound waves, and the musical note you experience is determined by the frequency of their vibration—the number of back-and-forth cycles per second. The sound waves themselves have been generated by vibrations of the glass, set in motion by friction at the point of contact with your finger. As for the tone’s purity and predictability, they arise from a basic principle of physics: resonance. When objects ranging from trampolines to buildings to guitar strings bounce, swing, or vibrate, they typically do so with a definite, predictable frequency; they are said to “resonate.” For the wine glass, resonance assures that the vibrational frequency and the resulting musical tone are steady and always the same.

American polymath Benjamin Franklin took advantage of this effect when he invented a musical instrument called the glass harmonica, consisting of a rotating iron shaft on which glass bowls of varying size are mounted. Each bowl, when touched by the player’s finger, reliably produces a unique note. Surely Franklin, who also famously demonstrated that lightning is related to static electricity, would have been delighted to learn that electricity originates in the flow of elementary particles—tiny, indivisible particulates of matter—and that these particles have properties rooted in the same principle that governs the sound of a wine glass.

Widespread in nature, resonance underlies the workings of clocks, musical instruments, and the cosmos. A pendulum, for instance, always swings at its resonance frequency, making it a dependable timekeeper. Pianos, marimbas, and Franklin’s armonica rely upon the stable frequencies of strings, bells, and glass bowls.

Remarkably, the universe itself resembles a musical instrument with its own pattern of resonant frequencies. Indeed, cosmic resonance is what creates the mountainous terrain seen in the image above. This graph presents data from the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, widely known as the LHC.

Since its opening in 2010, this gigantic apparatus—located in a 17-mile-long ring-shaped tunnel outside Geneva, Switzerland—has created collisions of subatomic particles by the millions every second. The debris from those collisions is observed by experiments the size of small office buildings, packed with high tech equipment. The resulting data is then organized and analyzed by thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, often by making pictures such as the one shown here. Their images can bring humanity new insight into the particles and forces—the bricks and mortar—of our universe.

Decades ago, physicists recognized that elementary particles are rapidly vibrating entities. As an example, take electrons, the particles found on the outskirts of atoms. Any stationary electron vibrates at a fixed rate, nearly a billion trillion times each second, and that rate is a resonant frequency of the cosmos. Similar resonance is displayed by almost every type of elementary particle, each with its own frequency of vibration.

Another important property of a particle is its mass, a sort of synonym for inertia, which describes how much effort is needed to change its motion. Surprisingly, the mass of an elementary particle is related to its frequency of vibration. (To see why requires combining Einstein’s relativity with quantum physics.) Each type of elementary particle has a unique mass, corresponding to its unique resonance frequency. Said another way, the notes of the cosmic instrument are to be found in the pattern of particle masses.

Physicists made this graph in order to search for new cosmic frequencies. The horizontal axis represents the frequency of vibration, while the vertical axis indicates how readily the universe responds at that frequency. (In the language of particle physics, the vertical axis indicates how often a certain process is observed in collisions of two protons, while the horizontal axis shows the amount of energy required to make that process occur.)

Images of this type can tell us about the properties of musical instruments. If we strummed a six-stringed guitar, a similar graph would show six spikes, one for the frequency of each vibrating string. An analogous picture for the armonica would show numerous narrow peaks, each representing a note that the instrument can produce. The heights and horizontal locations of the spikes would tell us the loudness and frequencies of the various notes.

This specific picture, whose three distinct bumps correspond to three cosmic frequencies, shows both the latest experimental data as of 2022 (black dots) and scientists’ attempts to predict and understand that data (the colored regions). Early versions of it were already being made in 2011, as scientists searched for evidence of a type of elementary particle known as the “Higgs particle” or “Higgs boson.”

The Higgs boson is a sign of one of the most important and enigmatic ingredients of the universe: the “Higgs field.” In the 1960s, several physicists hypothesized that this field might be present everywhere across the cosmos, and might have been switched on steadily and uniformly since the early moments of the Big Bang. To confirm this intriguing idea would require finding examples of Higgs bosons, each one a little ripple in the Higgs field. But none had yet been found when the LHC began running in 2010, and that’s why the search for this type of particle was the LHC’s highest priority.

It’s no exaggeration to say that our lives depend upon the Higgs field. It acts as a cosmic stiffening agent, making certain aspects of the universe more rigid. The stronger it is, the more rapidly the elementary particles vibrate and—thanks to the relation between mass and frequency mentioned above—the more mass they have. But were the Higgs field somehow shut off or removed from the universe, most elementary particles, electrons among them, would lose their mass. The consequences would be catastrophic. Massless electrons would instantly flee their atoms, and all ordinary matter everywhere—including the cells of all living creatures as well as the earth, the air, and the seas—would violently disintegrate.

By mid-2012, data collected by experiments at the LHC showed the first signs of a discernible third feature between the two outer bumps in the image. This new peak’s presence indicated the existence of a previously undiscovered particle, immediately suspected to be the Higgs boson. Meanwhile, its horizontal location revealed the particle’s resonance frequency and mass.

The peak at the left of the image represents a cosmic frequency and mass associated with another elementary particle, the Z boson. It was discovered decades ago as a towering spike in a similar graph, generated using data from a predecessor to the LHC. Here, brought about through a more subtle effect, it appears far more subdued—a sort of distant echo.

The bump on the right has a different appearance, being both asymmetric and broader than the other two, and indeed it has a different origin. With its left edge at 180, it reflects not a new cosmic frequency but a sort of overtone, or harmonic, of the Z boson’s frequency, which lies at 90. In musical terms, this puts it an octave higher than the Z boson’s fundamental tone. In physics terms, it corresponds to making two Z bosons at the same time, which requires disturbing the universe at twice the Z boson’s frequency or more. But Z pairs are rarely created at the LHC, and so this peak, too, is rather faint.

Since the spikes in the image characterize notes of the universe, a music lover might naturally ask how they would sound if played together. While their frequencies lie wildly beyond human hearing, we can imagine slowing them down proportionally and arranging them, like the vibrating glass, to generate sound waves in audible range. Suppose we were to set the left spike’s frequency to a piano’s middle C note, with the right bump an octave higher. Then the middle spike would lie close to, but uncomfortably above, an F note. A well-tuned F, with frequency 4/3 above that of middle C, would sound harmonious with the latter, but here the note is too high—the ratio of the Higgs and Z frequencies is 1.38, not 1.33. The resulting musical combination is discordant, unpleasant to the human ear.

One lesson of this picture, then, is that the universe is out of tune. The cosmos may resemble a musical instrument, but if we could hear its harmony, we probably wouldn’t enjoy it much. This raises many questions. Why aren’t these and other fundamental notes of the universe more harmonious? Are they determined by mysterious principles? Might knowing their origin lead us to a fuller appreciation of the cosmos? No one can be sure.

Despite these unanswered questions, other aspects of this image reflect a profound degree of understanding. Once the frequencies of the Z and Higgs bosons are known, along with a mere handful of other measurements, everything else in this picture can be predicted: the location and shape of the third peak, the heights of the peaks, and the landscape between them.

These predictions are made using a set of mathematical formulas that particle physicists refer to as their “Standard Model,” one of the greatest achievements of science. The formulas describe the behavior of all the known types of particles and all the forces by which they interact with one another, and do so with an accuracy that boggles the mind. Astoundingly, throughout all the publications that fill scientific libraries, there is as yet not a single example in which the Standard Model’s predictions have convincingly failed to match the results of an experiment.

Here, the full prediction of the Standard Model is given by the upper edge of the light blue and red regions. It closely follows the black dots, the data from the experimental measurements as of 2022. It is truly impressive that nature’s behavior, represented by such complex data with many hills and valleys, can be matched so closely by human calculations.

Moreover, in these calculations, every part of the Standard Model plays a role. Had any of its pieces been left out or misunderstood, physicists’ predictions would have sharply disagreed with the data, and the comparison shown in this graph would have been a dismal failure. Instead, its success provides overwhelming evidence that our most recently discovered particle—the newly identified note of the universe that forms the central spire—is indeed the long sought Higgs boson. In doing so, it confirms the reality of the Higgs field.

Over a century has passed since the discovery of the electron, the first elementary particle to be identified. Since that time, tens of thousands of scientists, funded through substantial investment by countries around the globe, have expanded our understanding of the cosmos to a degree unimaginable in the nineteenth century. Grand unsolved puzzles, including the origin of the cosmic frequencies, remain for physicists of the future to address. But the history books will long record that watershed moment in 2012 when the Standard Model finally came into focus—the moment when our species first discerned the pure, ethereal tone of the Higgs boson. ♦