Discovery Of “God Particle” Higgs Boson Could Be Announced Soon

The discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle seen as key to the basic functioning of the universe, could soon be announced by scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider on the border of France and Switzerland.

Known as the “God particle,” Higgs boson is believed to give mass to all other particles. Physicists have been working toward its discover, and many science bloggers are now speculating that they will announce its discovery at the upcoming International Conference on High Energy Physics, the Los Angeles Times reported. If true, it would be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last half of the century, the report said.

Peter Higgs, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, first theorized that there is an invisible, massless substance that acts like a kind of cosmic molasses, the Los Angeles Times reported. This substance would attach to passing particles and give them weight, ultimately holding the entire universe together.

To find the particle scientists needed to create high energy collisions of the basic particles needed to show this substance. There is already some evidence that Higgs boson exists, like work done by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, which found some initial hints that the particle exists but was unable to produce the necessary energy to fully show it.

The Large Hadron Collider shows signs in December that it was close to producing the Higgs boson, leading physics bloggers to speculate that the scientists there are ready to present their findings at July’s conference, Wired reported.

“The bottom line though is now clear: There’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look,” Wired quoted mathematician Peter Woit, who writes the blog Not Even Wrong. Woit said there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for Higgs boson, Wired reported.