CERN Nears ID of Theorized Higgs Boson Particle

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Scientists at the CERN research center say they are on the edge of identifying a subatomic particle “that is consistent with the Higgs boson theory,” said John Womersley, chief executive of Britain’s Science & Technology Facilities Council, at a Geneva-London event today.

Reuters includes a solid piece on this today. The CERN release indicates scientists are terribly close to confirming the existence of the theorized sub atomic particle, a building block of the universe.

Joe Incandela at CERN inGeneva said: “This is a preliminary result, but we think it’s very strong and very solid.”

The Higgs particle is sometimes whimsically referred to as the so-called “God particle,” a building block of all energy in the universe.

It remains a theory. Read more from CERN here.

Here’s an excerpt from this morning’s Reuters piece.

… although crucial for understanding how the universe was formed, remains theory at this writing. The theory postulates how particles clumped together to form stars, planets and even life.

Without the Higgs particle, the particles that make up the universe would have remained like a soup, the theory goes.

It is the last undiscovered piece of the Standard Model that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe. The model is for physicists what the theory of evolution is for biologists.

What scientists don’t yet know from the latest findings is whether the particle they have discovered is the Higgs boson as described by the Standard Model, a variant of the Higgs or an entirely new subatomic particle that could force a rethink on the fundamental structure of matter. Read MORE…