‘GOD PARTICLE HAS BEEN DISCOVERED’
Geneva: Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson “God particle” has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed. Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday — sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered. The Higgs Boson is a vital component of the “Standard Model” — the all-encompassing 30-year-old scientific theory of how the universe works at the simplest level. Without it, “nothing like human beings, or the earth we live on, could exist.”
Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson “God particle” has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed. Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday — sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
The Higgs Boson is a vital component of the “Standard Model” — the all-encompassing 30-yearold scientific theory of how the universe works at the simplest level. Without it, says US physicist Matt Strassler, “nothing like human beings, or the earth we live on, could exist”.
Why is it called a boson? Because elementary particles, the building blocks of the cosmos, come in two types — bosons and fermions — and the Higgs has been assigned to the first.
Physicists say the particle is like a wave from what would be the otherwise invisible Higgs field and would provide prime evidence that that underlying force is there.
Buchmueller, like all scientists at Cern, is silent on what might be revealed on July 4 by scientists who have analysed the product of many trillions of minibig bangs created over the past two years in Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). “We will all just have to be patient till Wednesday,” says Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on CMS’ rival team Atlas, blogging from a big particle physics conference in Australia. Last December, CMS and Atlas told a similar seminar at the sprawling Cern cam- pus on the Swiss-French border, that they had seen “tantalising glimpses” of what could be the boson, named after 82-year-old British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.
New York’s Columbia University said it was holding an early-hours pyjama party in the hope of seeing “sub-atomic fireworks”. In London, a concert hall across from the Houses of Parliament has been booked for a similar, but daytime, event. Japanese, Russian and Chinese scientists will be watching too. — Reuters