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Credit Credit Grant Cornett for The New York Times

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America's largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.'s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called "stomach share" - the amount of digestive space that any one company's brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.'s on America's growing weight problem. "We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue," Behnke recalled. "People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies." Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. "C.E.O.'s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they're uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things," Behnke said. "They don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy."

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury's chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public's ability to cope with the industry's formulations - from the body's fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.'s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.

In This Article:
* 'In This Field, I'm a Game Changer.'
* 'Lunchtime Is All Yours'
* 'It's Called Vanishing Caloric Density.'
* 'These People Need a Lot of Things, but They Don't Need a Coke.'

The discussion took place in Pillsbury's auditorium. The first speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd. "I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for us all," Mudd began. "Let me say right at the start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers - for what the public health community must do to bring this problem under control or for what the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who've looked hard at this issue, whether they're public health professionals or staff specialists in your own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn't do is nothing."

As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides - 114 in all - projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population - 40 million people - clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation's obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides - academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a "national epidemic."

Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the last thing in the world the C.E.O.'s wanted linked to their products: cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell, who was an especially vocal proponent of the view that the processed-food industry should be seen as a public health menace: "As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco."

"If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there," Mudd said, "I imagine they are beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now."

Mudd then presented the plan he and others had devised to address the obesity problem. Merely getting the executives to acknowledge some culpability was an important first step, he knew, so his plan would start off with a small but crucial move: the industry should use the expertise of scientists - its own and others - to gain a deeper understanding of what was driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the effort could unfold on several fronts. To be sure, there would be no getting around the role that packaged foods and drinks play in overconsumption. They would have to pull back on their use of salt, sugar and fat, perhaps by imposing industrywide limits. But it wasn't just a matter of these three ingredients; the schemes they used to advertise and market their products were critical, too. Mudd proposed creating a "code to guide the nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially to children."

I. 'In This Field, I'm a Game Changer.'
John Lennon couldn't find it in England, so he had cases of it shipped from New York to fuel the "Imagine" sessions. The Beach Boys, ZZ Top and Cher all stipulated in their contract riders that it be put in their dressing rooms when they toured. Hillary Clinton asked for it when she traveled as first lady, and ever after her hotel suites were dutifully stocked.

What they all wanted was Dr Pepper, which until 2001 occupied a comfortable third-place spot in the soda aisle behind Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But then a flood of spinoffs from the two soda giants showed up on the shelves - lemons and limes, vanillas and coffees, raspberries and oranges, whites and blues and clears - what in food-industry lingo are known as "line extensions," and Dr Pepper started to lose its market share.

Responding to this pressure, Cadbury Schweppes created its first spinoff, other than a diet version, in the soda's 115-year history, a bright red soda with a very un-Dr Pepper name: Red Fusion. "If we are to re-establish Dr Pepper back to its historic growth rates, we have to add more excitement," the company's president, Jack Kilduff, said. One particularly promising market, Kilduff pointed out, was the "rapidly growing Hispanic and African-American communities."

But consumers hated Red Fusion. "Dr Pepper is my all-time favorite drink, so I was curious about the Red Fusion," a California mother of three wrote on a blog to warn other Peppers away. "It's disgusting. Gagging. Never again."

Stung by the rejection, Cadbury Schweppes in 2004 turned to a food-industry legend named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz, who studied mathematics and holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard, runs a consulting firm in White Plains, where for more than three decades he has "optimized" a variety of products for Campbell Soup, General Foods, Kraft and PepsiCo. "I've optimized soups," Moskowitz told me. "I've optimized pizzas. I've optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I'm a game changer."

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Credit Grant Cornett for The New York Times; Prop Stylist: Janine Iversen

In the process of product optimization, food engineers alter a litany of variables with the sole intent of finding the most perfect version (or versions) of a product. Ordinary consumers are paid to spend hours sitting in rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is in question. Their opinions are dumped into a computer, and the data are sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which determines what features will be most attractive to consumers. Moskowitz likes to imagine that his computer is divided into silos, in which each of the attributes is stacked. But it's not simply a matter of comparing Color 23 with Color 24. In the most complicated projects, Color 23 must be combined with Syrup 11 and Packaging 6, and on and on, in seemingly infinite combinations. Even for jobs in which the only concern is taste and the variables are limited to the ingredients, endless charts and graphs will come spewing out of Moskowitz's computer. "The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create," he told me, "so I can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach."

Moskowitz's work on Prego spaghetti sauce was memorialized in a 2004 presentation by the author Malcolm Gladwell at the TED conference in Monterey, Calif.: "After . . . months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. . . . And sure enough, if you sit down and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy. And there are people who like it extra-chunky. And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, 'Are you telling me that one-third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce, and yet no one is servicing their needs?' And he said, 'Yes.' And Prego then went back and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line of extra-chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti-sauce business in this country. . . . That is Howard's gift to the American people. . . . He fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy."

Well, yes and no. One thing Gladwell didn't mention is that the food industry already knew some things about making people happy - and it started with sugar. Many of the Prego sauces - whether cheesy, chunky or light - have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half-cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has the equivalent of more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies. It also delivers one-third of the sodium recommended for a majority of American adults for an entire day. In making these sauces, Campbell supplied the ingredients, including the salt, sugar and, for some versions, fat, while Moskowitz supplied the optimization. "More is not necessarily better," Moskowitz wrote in his own account of the Prego project. "As the sensory intensity (say, of sweetness) increases, consumers first say that they like the product more, but eventually, with a middle level of sweetness, consumers like the product the most (this is their optimum, or 'bliss,' point)."

I first met Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan. As we talked, he made clear that while he has worked on numerous projects aimed at creating more healthful foods and insists the industry could be doing far more to curb obesity, he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on discovering what industry insiders now regularly refer to as "the bliss point" or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave. "There's no moral issue for me," he said. "I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn't have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead of my time."

Moskowitz's path to mastering the bliss point began in earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, 16 miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs. The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations when they are in the field. They know that over time, soldiers would gradually find their meals-ready-to-eat so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this M.R.E.-fatigue was a mystery. "So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring," Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent. "They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they'd had enough."

This contradiction is known as "sensory-specific satiety." In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits - be they Coca-Cola or Doritos - owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Thirty-two years after he began experimenting with the bliss point, Moskowitz got the call from Cadbury Schweppes asking him to create a good line extension for Dr Pepper. I spent an afternoon in his White Plains offices as he and his vice president for research, Michele Reisner, walked me through the Dr Pepper campaign. Cadbury wanted its new flavor to have cherry and vanilla on top of the basic Dr Pepper taste. Thus, there were three main components to play with. A sweet cherry flavoring, a sweet vanilla flavoring and a sweet syrup known as "Dr Pepper flavoring."

Finding the bliss point required the preparation of 61 subtly distinct formulas - 31 for the regular version and 30 for diet. The formulas were then subjected to 3,904 tastings organized in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Philadelphia. The Dr Pepper tasters began working through their samples, resting five minutes between each sip to restore their taste buds. After each sample, they gave numerically ranked answers to a set of questions: How much did they like it overall? How strong is the taste? How do they feel about the taste? How would they describe the quality of this product? How likely would they be to purchase this product?

Moskowitz's data - compiled in a 135-page report for the soda maker - is tremendously fine-grained, showing how different people and groups of people feel about a strong vanilla taste versus weak, various aspects of aroma and the powerful sensory force that food scientists call "mouth feel." This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release. These are terms more familiar to sommeliers, but the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

In addition to taste, the consumers were also tested on their response to color, which proved to be highly sensitive. "When we increased the level of the Dr Pepper flavoring, it gets darker and liking goes off," Reisner said. These preferences can also be cross-referenced by age, sex and race.

On Page 83 of the report, a thin blue line represents the amount of Dr Pepper flavoring needed to generate maximum appeal. The line is shaped like an upside-down U, just like the bliss-point curve that Moskowitz studied 30 years earlier in his Army lab. And at the top of the arc, there is not a single sweet spot but instead a sweet range, within which "bliss" was achievable. This meant that Cadbury could edge back on its key ingredient, the sugary Dr Pepper syrup, without falling out of the range and losing the bliss. Instead of using 2 milliliters of the flavoring, for instance, they could use 1.69 milliliters and achieve the same effect. The potential savings is merely a few percentage points, and it won't mean much to individual consumers who are counting calories or grams of sugar. But for Dr Pepper, it adds up to colossal savings. "That looks like nothing," Reisner said. "But it's a lot of money. A lot of money. Millions."

The soda that emerged from all of Moskowitz's variations became known as Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper, and it proved successful beyond anything Cadbury imagined. In 2008, Cadbury split off its soft-drinks business, which included Snapple and 7-Up. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group has since been valued in excess of $11 billion.
II. 'Lunchtime Is All Yours'
Sometimes innovations within the food industry happen in the lab, with scientists dialing in specific ingredients to achieve the greatest allure. And sometimes, as in the case of Oscar Mayer's bologna crisis, the innovation involves putting old products in new packages.

The 1980s were tough times for Oscar Mayer. Red-meat consumption fell more than 10 percent as fat became synonymous with cholesterol, clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. Anxiety set in at the company's headquarters in Madison, Wis., where executives worried about their future and the pressure they faced from their new bosses at Philip Morris.

Bob Drane was the company's vice president for new business strategy and development when Oscar Mayer tapped him to try to find some way to reposition bologna and other troubled meats that were declining in popularity and sales. I met Drane at his home in Madison and went through the records he had kept on the birth of what would become much more than his solution to the company's meat problem. In 1985, when Drane began working on the project, his orders were to "figure out how to contemporize what we've got."

Drane's first move was to try to zero in not on what Americans felt about processed meat but on what Americans felt about lunch. He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna - mothers - and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door. He summed up their remarks for me like this: "It's awful. I am scrambling around. My kids are asking me for stuff. I'm trying to get myself ready to go to the office. I go to pack these lunches, and I don't know what I've got." What the moms revealed to him, Drane said, was "a gold mine of disappointments and problems."

He assembled a team of about 15 people with varied skills, from design to food science to advertising, to create something completely new - a convenient prepackaged lunch that would have as its main building block the company's sliced bologna and ham. They wanted to add bread, naturally, because who ate bologna without it? But this presented a problem: There was no way bread could stay fresh for the two months their product needed to sit in warehouses or in grocery coolers. Crackers, however, could - so they added a handful of cracker rounds to the package. Using cheese was the next obvious move, given its increased presence in processed foods. But what kind of cheese would work? Natural Cheddar, which they started off with, crumbled and didn't slice very well, so they moved on to processed varieties, which could bend and be sliced and would last forever, or they could knock another two cents off per unit by using an even lesser product called "cheese food," which had lower scores than processed cheese in taste tests. The cost dilemma was solved when Oscar Mayer merged with Kraft in 1989 and the company didn't have to shop for cheese anymore; it got all the processed cheese it wanted from its new sister company, and at cost.

Drane's team moved into a nearby hotel, where they set out to find the right mix of components and container. They gathered around tables where bagfuls of meat, cheese, crackers and all sorts of wrapping material had been dumped, and they let their imaginations run. After snipping and taping their way through a host of failures, the model they fell back on was the American TV dinner - and after some brainstorming about names (Lunch Kits? Go-Packs? Fun Mealz?), Lunchables were born.

The trays flew off the grocery-store shelves. Sales hit a phenomenal $218 million in the first 12 months, more than anyone was prepared for. This only brought Drane his next crisis. The production costs were so high that they were losing money with each tray they produced. So Drane flew to New York, where he met with Philip Morris officials who promised to give him the money he needed to keep it going. "The hard thing is to figure out something that will sell," he was told. "You'll figure out how to get the cost right." Projected to lose $6 million in 1991, the trays instead broke even; the next year, they earned $8 million.

With production costs trimmed and profits coming in, the next question was how to expand the franchise, which they did by turning to one of the cardinal rules in processed food: When in doubt, add sugar. "Lunchables With Dessert is a logical extension," an Oscar Mayer official reported to Philip Morris executives in early 1991. The "target" remained the same as it was for regular Lunchables - "busy mothers" and "working women," ages 25 to 49 - and the "enhanced taste" would attract shoppers who had grown bored with the current trays. A year later, the dessert Lunchable morphed into the Fun Pack, which would come with a Snickers bar, a package of M&M's or a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, as well as a sugary drink. The Lunchables team started by using Kool-Aid and cola and then Capri Sun after Philip Morris added that drink to its stable of brands.

Eventually, a line of the trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day's recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar.

Credit Grant Cornett for The New York Times

When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for criticism. "One article said something like, 'If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.' "

III. 'It's Called Vanishing Caloric Density.'
At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, 1985, a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki named Heikki Karppanen told the remarkable story of Finland's effort to address its salt habit. In the late 1970s, the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a result, the country had developed significant issues with high blood pressure, and men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle - it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning "High Salt Content." By 2007, Finland's per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift - along with improved medical care - was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

Karppanen's presentation was met with applause, but one man in the crowd seemed particularly intrigued by the presentation, and as Karppanen left the stage, the man intercepted him and asked if they could talk more over dinner. Their conversation later that night was not at all what Karppanen was expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from quite a different vantage point: the man's name was Robert I-San Lin, and from 1974 to 1982, he worked as the chief scientist for Frito-Lay, the nearly $3-billion-a-year manufacturer of Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos.

Lin's time at Frito-Lay coincided with the first attacks by nutrition advocates on salty foods and the first calls for federal regulators to reclassify salt as a "risky" food additive, which could have subjected it to severe controls. No company took this threat more seriously - or more personally - than Frito-Lay, Lin explained to Karppanen over their dinner. Three years after he left Frito-Lay, he was still anguished over his inability to effectively change the company's recipes and practices.

By chance, I ran across a letter that Lin sent to Karppanen three weeks after that dinner, buried in some files to which I had gained access. Attached to the letter was a memo written when Lin was at Frito-Lay, which detailed some of the company's efforts in defending salt. I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company's intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country's excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, "people get addicted to salt."

Not much had changed by 1986, except Frito-Lay found itself on a rare cold streak. The company had introduced a series of high-profile products that failed miserably. Toppels, a cracker with cheese topping; Stuffers, a shell with a variety of fillings; Rumbles, a bite-size granola snack - they all came and went in a blink, and the company took a $52 million hit. Around that time, the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product's allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks - both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate - would be tapering off. Along with the rest of the snack-food industry, Frito-Lay anticipated lower sales because of an aging population, and marketing plans were adjusted to focus even more intently on younger consumers.

Except that snack sales didn't decline as everyone had projected, Frito-Lay's doomed product launches notwithstanding. Poring over data one day in his home office, trying to understand just who was consuming all the snack food, Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren't measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what's called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture - for Frito-Lay, anyway - emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. "In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments - the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips - was going up," Riskey said. "They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it." In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year.

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past. Baby boomers, especially, seemed to have greatly cut down on regular meals. They were skipping breakfast when they had early-morning meetings. They skipped lunch when they then needed to catch up on work because of those meetings. They skipped dinner when their kids stayed out late or grew up and moved out of the house. And when they skipped these meals, they replaced them with snacks. "We looked at this behavior, and said, 'Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,' " Riskey told me. "It was amazing." This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent "a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential."

Credit Grant Cornett for The New York Times

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry's most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension. The classic Lay's potato chips were joined by Salt & Vinegar, Salt & Pepper and Cheddar & Sour Cream. They put out Chili-Cheese-flavored Fritos, and Cheetos were transformed into 21 varieties. Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year, and the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.

To get a better feel for their work, I called on Steven Witherly, a food scientist who wrote a fascinating guide for industry insiders titled, "Why Humans Like Junk Food." I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. "This," Witherly said, "is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure." He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff's uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. "It's called vanishing caloric density," Witherly said. "If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there's no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever."

As for their marketing troubles, in a March 2010 meeting, Frito-Lay executives hastened to tell their Wall Street investors that the 1.4 billion boomers worldwide weren't being neglected; they were redoubling their efforts to understand exactly what it was that boomers most wanted in a snack chip. Which was basically everything: great taste, maximum bliss but minimal guilt about health and more maturity than puffs. "They snack a lot," Frito-Lay's chief marketing officer, Ann Mukherjee, told the investors. "But what they're looking for is very different. They're looking for new experiences, real food experiences." Frito-Lay acquired Stacy's Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay's hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium - nearly one-fifth a whole day's recommended maximum for most American adults - and were a huge hit among boomers.

The Frito-Lay executives also spoke of the company's ongoing pursuit of a "designer sodium," which they hoped, in the near future, would take their sodium loads down by 40 percent. No need to worry about lost sales there, the company's C.E.O., Al Carey, assured their investors. The boomers would see less salt as the green light to snack like never before.

There's a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. "The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack," Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools. He cited, for example, the school-food initiative championed by Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association, which is seeking to improve the nutrition of school food by limiting its load of salt, sugar and fat. "Imagine this," Carey said. "A potato chip that tastes great and qualifies for the Clinton-A.H.A. alliance for schools . . . . We think we have ways to do all of this on a potato chip, and imagine getting that product into schools, where children can have this product and grow up with it and feel good about eating it."

Carey's quote reminded me of something I read in the early stages of my reporting, a 24-page report prepared for Frito-Lay in 1957 by a psychologist named Ernest Dichter. The company's chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: "While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for 'letting themselves go' and enjoying them." Dichter listed seven "fears and resistances" to the chips: "You can't stop eating them; they're fattening; they're not good for you; they're greasy and messy to eat; they're too expensive; it's hard to store the leftovers; and they're bad for children." He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry. Dichter suggested that Frito-Lay avoid using the word "fried" in referring to its chips and adopt instead the more healthful-sounding term "toasted." To counteract the "fear of letting oneself go," he suggested repacking the chips into smaller bags. "The more-anxious consumers, the ones who have the deepest fears about their capacity to control their appetite, will tend to sense the function of the new pack and select it," he said.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. "The increased use of potato chips and other Lay's products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way," Dichter said, citing a string of examples: "potato chips with soup, with fruit or vegetable juice appetizers; potato chips served as a vegetable on the main dish; potato chips with salad; potato chips with egg dishes for breakfast; potato chips with sandwich orders."

In 2011, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that shed new light on America's weight gain. The subjects - 120,877 women and men - were all professionals in the health field, and were likely to be more conscious about nutrition, so the findings might well understate the overall trend. Using data back to 1986, the researchers monitored everything the participants ate, as well as their physical activity and smoking. They found that every four years, the participants exercised less, watched TV more and gained an average of 3.35 pounds. The researchers parsed the data by the caloric content of the foods being eaten, and found the top contributors to weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself - all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. "The starch is readily absorbed," Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study's authors, told me. "More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike" - which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind. More than 30 years have passed since Robert Lin first tangled with Frito-Lay on the imperative of the company to deal with the formulation of its snacks, but as we sat at his dining-room table, sifting through his records, the feelings of regret still played on his face. In his view, three decades had been lost, time that he and a lot of other smart scientists could have spent searching for ways to ease the addiction to salt, sugar and fat. "I couldn't do much about it," he told me. "I feel so sorry for the public."
IV. 'These People Need a Lot of Things, but They Don't Need a Coke.'
The growing attention Americans are paying to what they put into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the processed-food companies to address health concerns. Pressed by the Obama administration and consumers, Kraft, Nestlé, Pepsi, Campbell and General Mills, among others, have begun to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many products. And with consumer advocates pushing for more government intervention, Coca-Cola made headlines in January by releasing ads that promoted its bottled water and low-calorie drinks as a way to counter obesity. Predictably, the ads drew a new volley of scorn from critics who pointed to the company's continuing drive to sell sugary Coke.

One of the other executives I spoke with at length was Jeffrey Dunn, who, in 2001, at age 44, was directing more than half of Coca-Cola's $20 billion in annual sales as president and chief operating officer in both North and South America. In an effort to control as much market share as possible, Coke extended its aggressive marketing to especially poor or vulnerable areas of the U.S., like New Orleans - where people were drinking twice as much Coke as the national average - or Rome, Ga., where the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day. In Coke's headquarters in Atlanta, the biggest consumers were referred to as "heavy users." "The other model we use was called 'drinks and drinkers,' " Dunn said. "How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It's more efficient to get my existing users to drink more."

One of Dunn's lieutenants, Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division's efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: "How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?" (In response to Putman's remarks, Coke said its goals have changed and that it now focuses on providing consumers with more low- or no-calorie products.)

In his capacity, Dunn was making frequent trips to Brazil, where the company had recently begun a push to increase consumption of Coke among the many Brazilians living in favelas. The company's strategy was to repackage Coke into smaller, more affordable 6.7-ounce bottles, just 20 cents each. Coke was not alone in seeing Brazil as a potential boon; Nestlé began deploying battalions of women to travel poor neighborhoods, hawking American-style processed foods door to door. But Coke was Dunn's concern, and on one trip, as he walked through one of the impoverished areas, he had an epiphany. "A voice in my head says, 'These people need a lot of things, but they don't need a Coke.' I almost threw up."

The investors were thinking only about sales. They had already bought one of the two biggest farm producers of baby carrots in the country, and they'd hired Dunn to run the whole operation. Now, after his pitch, they were relieved. Dunn had figured out that using the industry's own marketing ploys would work better than anything else. He drew from the bag of tricks that he mastered in his 20 years at Coca-Cola, where he learned one of the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of food matters as much as the food itself.

Later, describing his new line of work, Dunn told me he was doing penance for his Coca-Cola years. "I'm paying my karmic debt," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: (Salt + Fat 2 / Satisfying Crunch) x Pleasing Mouth Feel = A Food Designed to Addict. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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It was the longest, most costly manhunt in science for an elusive particle that was said to be key to the workings of the universe. For a generation of physicists, it was an appointment with history. Credit Credit Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Meyrin, Switzerland - Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma's 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. "We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day," he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson - the long-sought "God particle."

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature's clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist - to know something that nobody else has ever known - was happening to someone else.

He flew back to Geneva the next day. "My wife was stunned," he recalled.

He would not see them again for months.

Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had every reason to believe that they were closing in on the Great White Whale of modern science: the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain all the others then known and how they fit together into the jigsaw puzzle of reality.

For almost half a century, physicists had chased its quantum ghost through labyrinths of mathematics and logic, and through tons of electronics at powerful particle colliders, all to no avail.

Now it had come down to the Large Hadron Collider, where two armies of physicists, each 3,000 strong, struggled against each other and against nature, in a friendly but deadly serious competition.

In physics tradition, they were there to check and complement each other in a $10 billion experiment too valuable to trust to only one group, no matter how brilliant and highly motivated.

The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe. (The other theorists were François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl R. Hagen of the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University.)

Elementary particles - the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our DNA and our iPhones - would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line.

Without this mystery field, everything in the universe would be pretty much the same, a bland fizz of particles running around at the speed of light. With it, there could be atoms and stars, and us.

Leon Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois, where the boson was being sought, once called it "the God particle," scandalizing his colleagues but delighting journalists, who kept using the name. Dr. Lederman later said that he wanted to call it the "goddamn particle."

The "Easter Bump Hunt" of April 2011, as it came to be called, was only one episode in a roller coaster of sleepless nights, bright promises, missed clues, false alarms, euphoria, depression, gritty calculation, cooperation and envy, all the tedium and vertiginous notions of modern science.

On the way to fulfill what they thought was their generation's rendezvous with scientific destiny, the physicists dangled from harnesses in hard hats to construct detectors bigger than apartment buildings in underground caverns. They strung wires and cranked bolts to coax thousand-ton magnets to less than a thousandth of an inch of where they needed to be. They wrote millions of lines of code to calibrate and run devices that would make NASA engineers stand by the track with their hats in their hands in admiration.

In their down time, they proposed marriage and made rap videos in the tunnels where subatomic particles collided. They ate, slept and partied, threw snowballs and worried that an unguarded smile in the cafeteria or a glance at a friend's laptop could bias a half-billion-dollar experiment or give away cosmic secrets.

Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way in an e-mail, "The experiments are very large collaborations and they have the good, the bad, the crooks, the Sopranos, the opportunists - a prototype of the world as we know it."

August 2010 Promised Fireballs
Everybody agreed that the Large Hadron Collider was the last stand in the hunt for the Higgs boson. Circling for 17 miles underneath the complex of aging postwar buildings outside Geneva (and out into France) that constitute the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the collider was designed to accelerate the subatomic particles known as protons to more than 99 percent of the speed of light - an energy of seven trillion electron volts - and crash them together.

The resulting tiny fireballs would recreate temperatures and densities that prevailed when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old. This was unexplored territory, and anything could happen, including - about once in every four billion collisions, according to theoretical calculations - a Higgs boson. To record it all, the two teams erected detectors, mountains of wire and computers, on opposite sides of the underground ring to capture the collisions.

"Either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen," said Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN scientist who led one of the groups, named Atlas. Their rival was called CMS. Both were named after their gigantic detectors. (Two other detectors, named Alice and LHCb, were built to investigate more specialized physics at the collider.)

The collider, 15 years and $10 billion in the making, was first turned on in September 2008. Then, just a week later, a section of it blew up when some electrical circuits proved unable to handle the currents needed for the giant superconducting magnets that steered the protons. Repairs took a year and a half; in March 2010, the collider started up again at half power to avoid stressing the circuits.

When I visited in August 2010, Dr. Gianotti's desk on the fourth floor of a new building a stone's throw from the main CERN cafeteria was as sleek and uncluttered as an aircraft's wing, the few papers on it arranged with geometrical precision. A slender woman with dancing eyes, Dr. Gianotti gave the impression of being as graceful and strong as piano wire. She needed all of that.

As the spokeswoman for the Atlas collaboration, Dr. Gianotti, then 46, was the nominal herder of 3,000 putative Einsteins, the orchestrator of a hive mind of brilliance - responsible for getting all the trains to run on time; for all the calibrations and simulations to match; for all the physicists, from the computer analysts who massaged the final data to anyone who ever wielded a screwdriver in the detector cavern, to sign off on the results from those fireball collisions.

That made Dr. Gianotti the most visible woman in high-energy physics, a field notoriously laden with testosterone. Journalists always asked about that, but it was no big deal, she said, adding that a quarter of the Atlas collaborators are women - so many that on occasion she had gone out and recruited men to attend management meetings.

Growing up in Milan, Dr. Gianotti had been fascinated by philosophy. Seduced into physics by reading some of Einstein's early work, she had taken two years off to study piano at the Milan Conservatory before getting a Ph.D. at the University of Milan in subnuclear physics in 1989 and joining CERN.

"Music is always in my mind," she reflected one night, in lightly accented English, as we were driving home from dinner. Asked what kind, she punched a button on the CD player, and the car suddenly filled with Schubert - "the most romantic of the classicists and the most classic of the romantics," she said.

At her desk, Dr. Gianotti was all business. She had made her mark working on liquid argon calorimeters, devices that could measure the energies and tracks of particles. Now she said she sometimes missed the chance to get her own hands dirty.

But then she gestured to the papers awaiting review on her desk.

"There is no typical day," she said, ticking off a list of meetings. "My days are very full, this is for sure. I think they are wonderful."

Asked what made her a good spokeswoman, Dr. Gianotti replied that it was her cheerfulness. Alluding to the explosion and shutdown, she said, "People in a difficult time want to see you are confident and optimistic." Now, she added, "You can see the excitement in their eyes."

Just down the hall was Dr. Gianotti's opposite number and rival of sorts, Guido Tonelli, 63, an ebullient professor from the University of Pisa, newly installed as the spokesman of the CMS collaboration. The Atlas and CMS teams shared the same building, facing each other over an atrium covered with posters of their devices and a coffee bar, using the same printers - and sometimes, the joke went, sleeping with one another.

Image

Vivek Sharma, left, who coordinated for the CMS team, and an Atlas counterpart, Eilam Gross. The two teams were intended to complement and challenge each other. Credit Sean McCabe/Photographs by David Ahntholz and Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

Dr. Tonelli was the third physicist to head the CMS team and perhaps the one who had traveled the longest road. The son of a farmer and a railroad worker, he had grown up in Pisa and was the first of his family to attend college - a result of effort and sacrifice "that I have tried to reward doing my best in the studies first and in my work later."

He confessed that he had helped his own cause back then by allowing his professors to believe (incorrectly) that he was related to Leonida Tonelli, a distinguished mathematician whose statue stands near the university's entrance. Guido Tonelli's CERN office was dominated by a large poster of his daughter, a ballerina.

Dr. Tonelli had his heart set on discovering the Higgs boson, which he said was crucial to understanding the future as well as the past: measuring it could help determine whether the universe was stable or whether the Higgs field could twitch and dissolve us all back into that bland soup of massless particles.
December 2010 Game of Bumps
Dr. Tonelli described his job as the search for anomalies.

For all their equipment and brainy multitudes, physicists would never be able to hold the Higgs boson in their hands. As soon as it was created, it would disintegrate in a shower of lesser particles - sometimes, for example, in a flash of gamma rays, or into a spray of lightweight particles.

So the signature of a Higgs boson or any other paradigm-shattering new particle would be an unexpected excess of gamma rays or some other particles - an anomalous bump on a graph. Dr. Tonelli said this happened about once a month now that the collider was running, but random flukes would also produce bumps.

If they were flukes, more data would make them fade into the statistical background, just as a flipped coin will eventually revert to an equal number of heads and tails. If not, the bumps would grow in slow motion into a bona fide discovery.

To physicists, the gold standard for a discovery is "5-sigma," a term meaning that the odds it occurred by chance are less than 1 in 3.5 million.

So "we crosscheck everything" and "try to kill" any anomaly that might be merely random, Dr. Tonelli said. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that is just what happens.

"But you never know when one of them will change everything," he said, adding, "Those have been the most exciting, intense days of my life."

In a perfect world, the same 5-sigma answer would emerge from each group independently and simultaneously. But each wanted to be first, if only by a hair: neither wanted to be the team that failed to flag a bump that eventually grew to a major discovery, or the one that jumped too soon on a fluke and wound up looking foolish. On each side, there were hundreds of physicists monitoring the different ways in which the Higgs or something else could show up.

In December 2010, Dr. Tonelli heard a rumor that his team's rivals in Atlas were chasing an auspicious bump that would be an even bigger deal than the Higgs: an unexpected massive new particle.

"This would be totally new physics," Dr. Tonelli said.

Dr. Tonelli put together a "quick reaction team" to check out its own data. "After a few days of frantic crosschecks we concluded there was nothing there," he said.

He said he was later told by an Atlas member whose name he cannot recall that the Atlas investigators had been encouraged by a plot from his own CMS team. It was shown during a workshop in Germany, and there was a small bump on it. Had Dr. Tonelli and his colleagues been chasing their own tail?

An Atlas physicist, Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia University, said that he vaguely remembered seeing a CMS plot, but that Atlas had undertaken the study in question of its own accord.

On another occasion the following year, another bump - implying the existence of a massive new force particle - had Dr. Tonelli and his colleagues convinced for a couple of months that they had discovered evidence of extra dimensions of space time. They notified the director general of CERN and drafted a paper - never published - describing the discovery. And then the signal faded like an old tied balloon.

"We've made many discoveries," Dr. Tonelli said, "most of them false."
Spring 2011 The Easter Egg Hunt
The biggest false alarm, one that went around the world, came from Atlas.

For Sau Lan Wu, of the University of Wisconsin by way of Hong Kong and Vassar, the Higgs boson was unfinished business. She was one of a handful of scientists who thought they were seeing the evidence of the Higgs back in 2000 in data from an earlier CERN collider called LEP. Unconvinced, CERN shut that collider down so the Large Hadron Collider could be built in its place. In the spring of 2011, Dr. Wu thought she had found the Higgs again.

A cheerful and controlling presence, partial to wearing red, Dr. Wu thinks of herself as a mother to the 47 former students and postdoctoral fellows whose portraits line the hallway outside her CERN office. As a young postdoc at M.I.T. in 1974, she had helped Samuel Ting win a Nobel Prize for discovering the J/psi, a particle that was the last big surprise in physics, and later was co-discoverer of the gluon, the particle that holds quarks together in protons.

Dr. Wu's team in Wisconsin was the first American group to join the Atlas collaboration, back in 1993. When the collider was restarted, they had hit the ground running. By Easter 2011, they had detected a telltale excess of gamma rays, pointing to the same Higgs she and others had thought they were discovering 10 years earlier.

Even more provocatively, Dr. Wu's gamma-ray signal was much stronger than theory predicted, suggesting that on its way to oblivion the Higgs had temporarily changed into other massive particles yet unknown to science, a discovery that could dwarf that of the boson and shake not just physics but cosmology.

Her group wrote a short paper, an "internal note" to alert their Atlas colleagues, suggesting "that the present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model."

Their note was supposed to be confidential - results are not supposed to be released to the outside world until the entire collaboration has checked and approved them - but within hours the note's abstract was posted in the comments section of a physics blog, Not Even Wrong, run by Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia.

Bedlam ensued in the physics world. Dr. Sharma and hundreds of other physicists abandoned their families and canceled vacations to go back to CERN.

The aftermath, when the signal turned out to be another fluke, was brutal. It was suggested that whoever was responsible for leaking the report should leave the Atlas collaboration.

Many physicists, Dr. Wu admits, thought that she herself had leaked the report. A year and a half later, she still found it hard to talk about the Easter event.

"I was so excited I couldn't control my emotions," Dr. Wu recalled. She wrote the note as a way of alerting the Atlas community, she said. "I thought CMS would go on vacation and we could get ahead. I'm sorry I did that."

For Dr. Gianotti, the incident was a lesson in the need for keeping your mouth shut, helping to cement her distrust of bloggers. "Things should be properly understood inside the collaboration before being blogged outside." Still, "things happen in life," she added. "My attitude is always positive."

For CMS, the incident served as what Dr. Sharma called "a good drill."

Dr. Tonelli said: "In retrospect, this fear of being scooped by Atlas was useful. Once you are under attack, you start to focus."

July 2011 Still Missing
Thus tested, both collaborations began drinking from a fire hose of data as the collider kept racking up collisions by the hundreds of trillions. In the early summer of 2011, both Atlas and CMS began recording a surplus of W bosons, particles that carry the so-called weak nuclear force that drives radioactive decay. That was another telltale sign of the Higgs. On the eve of a big conference in Grenoble, France, Dr. Sharma, of CMS, and Bill Murray, of Atlas, held a summit meeting in the CERN cafeteria and opened their laptops.

"I showed mine, and he showed his," Dr. Sharma said. "We had many coffees."

Dr. Murray recalled: "Bang! It's all looking good."

Left, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, and Bill Murray, deputy physics coordinator for Atlas. The teams encountered several false "bumps" in the data. Credit Illustration by Sean Mccabe/Photograph by Daniel Auf der Mauer for The New York Times

The results were reported at the Grenoble conference with great hoopla.

But by the next big conference a month later, in Mumbai, India, the bump was gone.

Dr. Murray said, "It was bizarre: twice as much data and there was nothing."

This was beginning to be the story of the Higgs.

Physicists already knew by the time the CERN collider started up that if the Higgs existed, it would be found in a narrow window of possible masses - equivalent to 115 billion to 200 billion electron volts of energy. Their task was to sort through that window, looking for the telltale excess, or bump, like a sports fan scanning the radio dial in his car looking for the Yankees broadcast.

By the fall of 2011, most of that window had been ruled out, and physicists worried that the whole window might be closed by the end of the year, meaning that the Higgs, or at least the simplest version predicted by the theorists, did not exist - and sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of a better understanding of our origins.

Paradoxically, many physicists, including Dr. Sharma, who admitted to an "anarchic tendency," found that prospect thrilling.

The Higgs boson fit like a key into a lock into the Standard Model, a suite of equations that was a battle-tested explanation of most of the forces of nature. But physics, Dr. Sharma explained, advances on surprises.

"Every measurement I've made in my career has been in confirmation of the Standard Model," he grumbled.

For Dr. Tonelli, however, it was a dark time. He recalled being at a conference in November where a theorist had summarized the situation by showing a "terrible slide" of a grave with the name Higgs on it. "Since Peter was 83," he said of the physicist from whom the boson takes its name, "that was not a good idea."
October 2011 Too Big to Ignore
In the fall, there was a changing of the guard in Atlas. Eilam Gross, a former rock musician complete with earring and a Lou Reed haircut, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, joined Dr. Murray as co-convenor of the Higgs search, filling in for a colleague who was going on maternity leave.

Dr. Gross had followed an unlikely route to this mission. After serving in the Israeli military as an intelligence officer, he was studying sound engineering in New York when he happened to read "The Tao of Physics," by Fritjof Capra, a popular book melding physics and Eastern thought.

He dropped everything and went back to Israel, studied string theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then moved on to experimental work, all the while trying to keep up his music career.

He became what he called a "Higgs soldier" while working on the LEP accelerator. "There are 6,000 Higgs soldiers," he said of the Large Hadron Collider, "and they all deserve the Nobel Prize."

He had been applying for the Higgs job in Atlas for years, and had given up until he got a call one day.

When it finally happened for him, Dr. Gross recalled expressing some trepidation about his new role. "What will I do?" he asked.

Dr. Murray told him not to worry, he was going to have the time of his life.

It didn't take long.

While physicists fretted about the death of the Higgs, something was happening out in the wilds of uncertainty. One bump on physicists' charts, from the W bosons, was disappearing. But another was blooming like the shy girl at a dance.

In retrospect, nobody could remember exactly when she had come in. But she was the one who would marry the prince.

The bump may have appeared as early as May. It was then, Dr. Murray said, that the Atlas group had discovered an "excess" in gamma rays corresponding to a mass of about 128 billion electron volts. (By comparison, a proton, the building block of the atomic nucleus, is about a billion electron volts.) The bump corresponded to a single particle, a flake of hypothetical energy, that weighed as much as an atom of iodine.

Nobody paid any attention. "End of story," Dr. Murray said.

The bump persisted, rising and falling as data from more collisions and more channels were added, and kept being dismissed. It continued to grow over the fall until it had reached the 3-sigma level - the chances of being a fluke were less than 1 in 740, enough for physicists to admit it to the realm of "evidence" of something, but not yet a discovery.

Dr. Gianotti recalled being shown the bump during a meeting. Her reaction was characteristically guarded: "Hmm, hmm. That was nice, but let's hope."

Dr. Gross had a markedly different reaction. One evening late in November, he was in Paris at a workshop, staying at a colleague's house. After a wine-soaked meal and some grappa, he fell asleep on the couch.

While he slept, a new data analysis came in from CERN. At 3 a.m. his colleagues Marumi Kado and Alex Read decided to wake up their gently snoring boss. They asked him if he wanted to see the Higgs boson.

Dr. Gross jumped up. "What? Where?" he asked. As he described it later in a blog post, they were all in a state of shock. The bump was too big to ignore anymore.

"We couldn't believe our eyes. We looked at the screen for ages before we started to digest what we were seeing," he said. "I think this was the first time Marumi, me and Alex realized it could be the real thing."
November 2011 Oozing Into View
On the other side of the wall of (mostly) silence between the teams, a signal was also oozing into view.

Dr. Tonelli, of CMS, saw it first on Nov. 8. He was making his rounds, talking to his young recruits. In the morning, one group showed him a pair of events that had resulted in a spray of four light particles, a rare "four-lepton" signal. That was one of the signature ways that a Higgs boson would dissolve.

That afternoon he met with a second group in the cafeteria. One of them opened a laptop and showed him a bump in the gamma-gamma channel, the other big Higgs decay channel. It was almost 3-sigma and was at the same energy as the morning bump, about 125 billion electron volts.

"At the end of the meeting, there was some light in their eyes," he said. "It was my birthday. I considered it a sort of gift."

The following week, at a meeting in Paris, some people were still talking about the death of the Higgs. Dr. Tonelli was one of the few people in the world who knew differently.

"I was laughing internally," he said.

Dr. Sharma, of CMS, went home for Thanksgiving and a long-awaited reunion with his family.

In his pocket as he ate was a new plot combining the results from both channels, a new bump indicating a Higgs boson at 125 billion electron volts. A neighbor pestered him with questions about the search, but Dr. Sharma wouldn't talk.

Eilam Gross proposed to his girlfriend, Talia Levy Tytiun, in the Atlas cavern at CERN in March 2012. Credit Claudia Marcelloni de Oliveira

A year earlier, many of his colleagues had been ready to write off the Higgs boson, and with it the Standard Model. But "on Thanksgiving Day," he said, "we knew the jig in some sense was up."

"I would have preferred it the other way," he said with a sigh, then added: "I knew before the rest of the world. That is all I need."

Afterward he marveled at how attitudes toward physics had changed from a few years earlier, when some people feared the new collider would destroy Earth. That and the "God particle" talk had gotten the public's attention, he had to admit: "Once neighbors find out that Sharma is involved in that black hole thing, the dog doesn't pee in my yard anymore."
Dec. 13, 2011 The Long Hello
Neither Atlas nor CMS knew what the other had until Nov. 28, when the two team leaders, Dr. Gianotti and Dr. Tonelli, met with CERN's director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, in his office.

It was apparent from the outset that nature had dealt Atlas the stronger hand, at least for the first round. Dr. Murray, of Atlas, felt both reassured and relieved.

"If there really is a Higgs, Atlas got lucky and CMS got unlucky," he said.

According to Atlas, the new particle had a mass of 126 billion electron volts; according to CMS, it was 124 billion.

Neither experiment was even close to having the statistical goods - a 5-sigma level of significance - to declare a discovery. But the fact that two separate experiments were hinting at roughly the same answer was encouraging, and worth telling the world about. CERN scheduled a special seminar on Dec. 13. Dr. Gianotti, speaking through the pain of a toothache and dental surgery to an overflow crowd at CERN and physics fans everywhere clustered around Webcasts, went first.

"If we are just being lucky, it will take a lot of data to kill it," she said.

It would also take a lot more data to confirm what was still at best a promising hint, with a 1-in-100 chance of being a fluke.

The results put the focus on the next big meeting, the International Conference on High Energy Physics, scheduled for July 4 in Melbourne, Australia, by which time the amount of data from the collider would have doubled. At the very least it would be an interesting progress report to see if the bumps were still there.

Dr. Tonelli made no bones about his belief that this was the Higgs at long last. He told Dr. Heuer, the director general, to "prepare the troops," and his old friend Dr. Englert, a founder of the Higgs theory, not to book vacation for the beginning of July.

But the experimentalists had all seen promising bumps (and promising reputations staked on them) come and go. "I don't see the smoking guns," said Dr. Spiropulu, the Caltech professor. And Dr. Sharma cautioned: "The game is still on. People have to be prepared for there to be no Higgs."
January 2012 The Mother of Everything
Characteristically, Dr. Gianotti was playing her cards close to the vest. She was less excited about the nearly overlapping bumps, she said, than about the fact that they had now managed to exclude almost the whole mass range that had existed for the Higgs only a year before. Now there was nowhere left for it to be.

"This was really important," she said. "For me, it was clear now where we were going to focus in the next months. So no additional distractions in other mass regions."

From now on, the rules would be different.

To avoid bias, both teams proceeded to "blind" themselves and not look at the relevant data until the Melbourne meeting. Somewhere along that time, Dr. Gianotti admitted, she had stopped playing the piano, unable to give it the focus it deserved.

In January 2012, Dr. Tonelli handed the reins of CMS to Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Asked if this was a bittersweet moment to step down, Dr. Tonelli said he had been living a dream. He compared himself to the third runner in a four-man relay race, "a runner that did a fantastic time in his fraction." He said, "I could not have asked more of my life."

Dr. Incandela, a man with a warm, casual demeanor, was not so sure at all that the Higgs had been discovered on the previous watch.

"Every other day I think we've found it, and every other day I think we haven't," he said over lunch shortly after taking over. He described collaborations like CMS as "the last bastion of communism," and his new job as "a crisis a day." The group had only a month after recording the last data to analyze the results from 2011, he complained. "So much stress," he said. "We'll have to do it again this year."

He firmly rejected one idea that was buzzing around the blogosphere - that by combining their results the two collaborations could take a shortcut to the 5-sigma goal. "There's no race - this is a 20-year program," he snapped. "This is a serious business."

Dr. Incandela had wandered into science from the art world. Growing up in Chicago, he studied at its Art Institute, intending to be a sculptor. He got interested in science while studying the chemistry of ceramics, went on to get a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and then worked at CERN and Fermilab, where in 1995 he helped discover the top quark, the last missing matter particle in the Standard Model.

He brought with him a deeply philosophical and historical viewpoint on the quest to understand nature. The Higgs boson reminded him of the ancient Stoic notion of "pneuma," a sort of force or tension that permeated space and gave substance to things. It was the first example in history of people wondering about the origin of mass.

"The Higgs is sort of like the mother of everything," he said. "It tells you something very fundamental about the entire universe. So measuring its mass, for instance, could tell us whether the universe is stable or not. This is really unbelievable if you think about it."

"So that tells you how deeply we've touched into this fabric," he went on, "and this fabric is everywhere. Throughout the universe. So for me that is a really profound thing about the Higgs. It's not like other particles."

In March, adding to the sense of momentum that the Higgs was finally being run to earth, physicists from Fermilab said they had measured their own bump in data from the lab's Tevatron collider, which had been the world's biggest for 20 years but had shut down for good the previous fall because the government couldn't afford to run it anymore. As at CERN, there had been two groups and two detectors who were now combining their data for what would amount to a last hurrah and a what-might-have-been for the Tevatron. The Fermilab physicists had found a broad hump in their data, between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts - the same general area as the CERN results.

Dmitri Denisov, a leader of the Fermilab effort, wrote in an e-mail at the time, "It is clearly not the answer to crossword, but an important piece of the puzzle!"

The data were of scant statistical significance, however, having a chance of about 1 in 100 of being a fluke. Over the following weeks, Fermilab would improve those statistics to a chance of 1 in 550, heartbreakingly short of the 3-sigma criteria required to claim "evidence" of the Higgs. If there really had been a race, one of the contestants was now out.

Back in Switzerland that same month, during a break when the Large Hadron Collider was not running, Dr. Gross took his girlfriend, Talia Levy Tytiun, down into the Atlas cavern. "I decided that I want to propose to Talia in the place which was the symbol of my life at this Higgs hunting period," he explained.

"But believe me, I checked a thousand times with her before to make sure she will say yes."
June 2012 Opening the Box
On June 18, the two experiments stopped recording data in order to get ready for Melbourne. By then they had already collected as many collisions - some 400 trillion - as they had the entire previous year.

The Atlas teams had already begun analyzing the first batch of this data a week before. Dr. Gianotti was at a conference at Fermilab when her colleague Dr. Kado sent her a plot of the new data.

The gamma rays were still there, and had grown in significance, putting the boson on the verge of reality. Dr. Gianotti scrawled a note back: "Oh, my God."

On July 4, 2012, CERN erupted in celebrations after both teams announced they had discovered a Higgs-like boson. Over its life, the project involved 6,000 physicists and cost more than $10 billion. Credit Dr. Natalia Panikashvili

A week later, her team looked at another important decay channel, and her enthusiasm deflated. There was nothing. She spent a few days and nights with her "neurons spinning," she recalled, wondering how they could have been fooled.

In the next two batches of data, however, nine candidates showed up in the "zed" channel, as they called it. "It was just beautiful to see those," Dr. Gianotti said.

At 10 p.m. on June 14, small teams of CMS physicists began "opening the box" on their data. Later that night, Dr. Incandela received a plot from the so-called 4-lepton channel, showing a spike at 124 billion electron volts.

He later told the writer Ian Sample that his life changed at that moment.

That afternoon, almost 300 physicists crowded into the room to hear talks on the first results of the unblinding, and the entire collaboration learned that the Higgs was nigh. People were sitting on the floor and standing, Dr. Tonelli said. Another 307 people had linked in by videoconference.

The room was too hot, all the doors had been opened. Dr. Tonelli said, "Everybody was really feeling we were doing something important."

On June 22, Dr. Heuer announced that there would be a special symposium at CERN on the morning of July 4, the day the Melbourne meeting was to start. Scientists who had already bought tickets to Australia rushed to rebook.

At the time, it seemed like a gamble: neither experiment had yet reached the all-important 5-sigma level.

But as various scientists were pointing out, CERN couldn't go on almost discovering the Higgs boson forever. Some said CERN should just shut up until the discovery was official.

"If you only have 4.9 you are not allowed to call it a discovery," Dr. Heuer said later. "But it was sure that even if being short of 5-sigma, if I see both experiments I can still call it a discovery because we are beyond 5 if we combine the two."

The members of each of the collaborations had to approve anything that was to be presented at Melbourne, which meant that their leaders had a week to mobilize an army and read a thousand pages of papers and reports.

Dr. Incandela, of CMS, said he felt "like a hunted animal."

"I felt tremendous stress, obviously, because things were very tight," he recalled. "Several times per day, I would just say, 'O.K., don't panic, we're going to make this.' But my goal was to make sure we did everything right, and that the collaboration would not regret it, and that the collaboration would all feel part of it, because everyone worked on this in one way or another."

In a conference room near his office, he set up a SWAT team of a dozen of his brightest young analysts, his "kids," as he called them. "Keep your smiles to yourself," he warned them, if they happened to find themselves in the company of their rivals.

On the night of June 24, the graduate students and postdocs in Atlas were tiptoeing toward the 5-sigma finish line. Among them was Sven Kreiss, a New York University graduate student who got a preliminary glimpse of the answer alone in his office late that night when, as part of a crosscheck, he combined the data from two signatures of the Higgs decay and found the result breached 5-sigma. The next day he sent a plot to his adviser Kyle Cranmer, whose birthday it was, saying he had a present for him.

Dr. Cranmer shot back a joyful expletive worthy of the discovery of a sacred particle.

The job of ultimately confirming the boson's discovery had been entrusted to another pair of graduate students, Haoshuang Ji, a Wisconsin student, and Aaron Armbruster of the University of Michigan - who had sent the plot that Dr. Gross had woken up to in November. They were each working to combine all the Higgs data from all the myriad ways it could fall apart and leave a trace in the detectors. This calculation would make or break the Higgs, because the boson had to behave properly in all its guises.

On the afternoon of June 25, Mr. Ji announced he had gotten a result of 5.08 sigma, causing cheers to go ringing down the corridor outside Dr. Wu's office; everybody ran to sign the printout. The next day, Mr. Armbruster arrived at the same result.

Atlas was at 5-sigma.

The scorecard, as later enumerated by Dr. Wu:

1,000 trillion proton-proton collisions

240,000 Higgs bosons

350 pairs of gamma rays

8 sets of lightweight particles from the lepton channel.

From this trickle of a trickle of atomic pitter-pat, 6,000 physicists had finally started to put a face on the ghost of the vacuum, the secret controller of cosmic destiny.

Filling in that face could take years. Not knowing yet how closely the new particle matched the predictions of the Standard Model, the physicists took to calling it a "Higgs-like boson." Or as Dr. Cranmer put it, "Not a God particle but a God-like particle."

"We don't know what nature has prepared for us," Dr. Gianotti said.

She added, "Clearly if we had not discovered the Higgs boson it would have been much more intriguing from a physics point of view. But it is so nice to find a new particle."

On the eve of the scheduled announcement, Dr. Incandela rehearsed his talk and found that his team was still nervous. Were they ready to go public? It was too late, he told them. They were at 5-sigma. The train had left the station. "We have to stand by our data," he said.

Later, he said it was what they needed to hear.
July 4, 2012 Champagne and Pandemonium
CERN officials locked their auditorium three days before the special symposium to prevent people from camping out in it. Still, the night before, students and scientists began sleeping on the steps. Dr. Higgs and the other founders of the Higgs theory, Dr. Englert, Dr. Hagen and Dr. Guralnik walked into the auditorium on the morning of July 4 to a standing ovation.

Dr. Incandela finished writing his talk at 8:42 that morning. The seminar started at 9. When he walked in, he recalled, "I was just so happy that everything came together - I really enjoyed giving the talk."

At one point, he noticed that the hand holding a laser pointer was shaking. "It was just the adrenaline," he said. "My heart was pounding."

At the end, he flashed a plot of CMS's final data analysis, showing the big new bump. The room exploded in applause.

He thanked CERN and the world. "These results are global," he said, "and now shared with all of mankind."

Dr. Gianotti, of Atlas, now had to follow Dr. Incandela, having gone first in December. After the news from CMS, she wondered if anyone would even be interested in what she had to say. "I'm saying to myself, 'Well, even if our results were essential, in some sense they will be nothing new compared to what they've seen already.' "

If nothing else, she thought, her talk would be a valentine to the passion and competence of the 3,000 Atlas scientists.

"Every slide was a reward to the work of many, many people," she said. "So I was feeling so proud."

"And I think I got the energy from the eyes of some of my Atlas colleagues who were sitting here in the auditorium," she added. "The fact that they were looking at me with such intensity and attention was giving me really the strength to go on."

When she showed the Atlas 5-sigma result, the audience exploded again. The applause seemed to go on forever. It had been left to Dr. Heuer to declare officially that a new particle had been discovered.

"I think we have it," he said. The cheers began again. Dr. Higgs was seen wiping away tears.

The morning dissolved into pandemonium and Champagne, in the CERN auditorium and in labs, classrooms, conference rooms and living rooms in every time zone in which humans wondered about their universe. Dr. Wu waded through the crowd. She hugged Dr. Higgs.

"I've been looking for you my whole life," she said.

"Well," he replied, "now you have found me."

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a photo caption with this article misstated the temperature of the cooling system around the accelerator ring at CERN. It is -456 degrees Fahrenheit, not -520 degrees.

Correction:

An article on Tuesday about the search for the Higgs boson misidentified, at one point, the group for which a physicist, Vivek Sharma, works. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, Dr. Sharma works for CMS, not for Atlas.

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Meyrin, Switzerland - Vivek Sharma missed his daughter. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva.