The Higgs boson and the rise of the standard model of particle physics in the 1970s

At the dawn of the 1970s, the idea of a massive scalar boson as the keystone of a unified theoretical model of the weak and electromagnetic interactions had yet to become anchored in a field that was still learning to live with what we now know as the standard model of particle physics. As the various breakthroughs of the decade gradually consolidated this theoretical framework, the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) field and its boson emerged as the most promising theoretical model to explain the origin of mass.