God Particle Discovered: The Real Quest Begins Now

Scientists working at the world’s biggest experiment Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva reckon they may have found the last piece of the jigsaw that explains how the universe works.

Physicists working at world’s biggest experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider said that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a potential key to an understanding of why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

A representation of the search for the Higgs boson.

LHC is a 27 mile tunnel deep under the border between France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe started and to find the Higgs boson. The LHC costs about around 10 billion USD to build and involved 10,000 scientists from around 100 countries.

Scientists all over the world are searching for existence of this particle for around 50 years.

“I think we have it,” Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, said in an interview from his office outside Geneva, calling the discovery “a historic milestone.” His words signalled what is probably the beginning of the end for one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science. If scientists are lucky, the discovery could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began.

 ”Seeing something new is really the beginning of this long journey to understand what on Earth it is that you have seen,” Tara Shears, who works on the LHCb detector at Cern, said. “It’s like turning up to a railway station to pick someone up who you’ve never met before. You arrive at the station, the train comes in, and there’s someone standing on the platform. You’re guessing it’s them, but you’re not going to know until you walk up and check who they are.”

Scientists have already cautioned that the discovery may not answer all the questions they have about pressing mysteries in nature.

“I find it a very depressing prospect, the possibility that this may be the last great discovery for many decades,” Prof. Weinberg added.

Nonetheless, the scientific world was in agreement that the discovery was of major importance.

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, Mr. Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, said: “This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize. ”If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, it will be strong evidence for the so-called standard model of particle physics, the theory that explains all our experiments so far,” Mr. Hawking said.  ”But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn’t expect. For this reason I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn’t be found. It seems I have just lost $100.”

Page 1 of 2 | Next page