God Particle Discovered by International Scientists?
The world of science has been buzzing over the past few days over recently discovered clues to the decades-long question: is there a God particle?
This past weekend American and Swiss scientists announced that they may have detected "hints" or first glimpses of the hypothetical Higgs boson, or more commonly referred to by media outlets as the God particle.
The clues that surfaced this past weekend give scientific believers, that is those that adhere to the Standard Model of particle physics, hope that their long quest to find a God particle may be answered sooner rather than later.
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Scientists expect to know the results of the recent findings within a month, following a period of data verification.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research believe that they will have even more information as to the existence of a God particle within a year's time.
The search for the 'God particle' has been a decades-long, costly scientific experiment that uses atomic smashers, such as the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider, to smash particles at high speeds in order to divide them into their constituent elements. With the particles divided, scientists study the pieces in the hope of finding the Higgs boson.
If the Higgs boson does exist, it is thought to resolve inconsistencies in theoretical physics because Higgs boson is thought to be the particle that endows other particles with mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson would confirm why some elements of our universe have mass and others do not.
The excitement around the potential discovery of the Higgs boson is that it would change the model of the universe as we understand it today, because it would determine that the mass of all particles or all matter is derived from the Higgs field.
The search for Higgs boson began 40 years ago when particle physicist Professor Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh proposed his theory on the existence of a new particle that explains the origins of mass.
The Higgs boson only began to be referred to as the "God particle" in the media following the 1993 publishing of Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman's book, "The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?"
Prior to this past weekend, conclusive evidence had yet to be discovered about the existence of Higgs boson.
