Fireworks on the 4th of July

After half a century of waiting, the drama was intense. Physicists slept overnight outside the auditorium to get seats for the seminar at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland. Ten thousand miles away on the other side of the planet, at the world's most prestigious international particle physics conference, hundreds of physicists from every corner of the globe lined up to hear the seminar streamed live from Geneva (see Fig. 1). And in universities from North America to Asia, physicists and students gathered to watch the streaming talks. © 2013 American Association of Physics Teachers.