Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a.k.a. CERN, are expected to announce on Wednesday, July 4, that enough evidence has been gathered to show the so-called "God particle," believed to hold the answer to fundamental questions about the universe, does indeed exist. The announcement is expected at a conference in Geneva.
After decades of work and billions of dollars spent, however, CERN researchers said they are not 100 percent certain as to make an official discovery announcement. Instead, experts familiar with CERN's research said on Monday, July 2, that the comprehensive data will show the footprint and shadow of the particle known as the Higgs boson, but will not provide definite proof it has been glimpsed or discovered, according to the Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs," said CERN theorist John Ellis.
Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics after whom the particle was named, is among those invited to attend the press conference on Wednesday in Switzerland. The management at CERN, however, want the two teams of scientists to reach the "five sigma" level of certainty with their results, meaning to be 99.99995 percent sure of their findings. Tom Kibble, an emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has been invited to the press conference as well, but is unable to attend. "My guess is that it must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there," he told the Sunday Times.
The Higgs boson is believed to hold the key to understanding the universe. According to physicists, the Higgs boson's job is to give the mass of the particles that make up atoms. Without this mass, these particles would wander across the cosmos at the speed of light, without being able to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons together at the speed of light in order to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Should the physicists' theory prove to be correct, every trillion collisions should create a few Higgs bosons, before rapidly decaying. This decay, in turn, would leave a "footprint" behind, appearing as a bump in their graphs.
More than 1,600 trillion collisions have been created in the tunnel, but there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles. Now, however, it is believed that two separate teams of scientists have found evidence of the particle. The two teams, CMS and ATLAS, run independent experiments in secret from each other.
