SMALL PRINT:NOW THEY SEE IT, now they don't. The Higgs boson seems to be simultaneously revealing itself while eluding scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, with excitement building that the so-called God particle has been hit upon. An announcement is expected today. But what's really going on?
What the Higgs is the Higgs?
Finding the Higgs Boson – the particle that up until now has been theoretical, and in essence ties everything together in particle physics – was one of the reasons the LHC was built.
It is theorised that the Higgs field is the missing link that gives mass to the particles that make up atoms. And it’s that field and the particles, formed just after the Big Bang that are the basis of, well, everything.
How important is this really?
It’s difficult to quantify, but the discovery of the Higgs boson would be monumentally significant. Particle physics is understood on what’s called The Standard Model, a model of mathematical rules that figures out how all particles interact. The Higgs Boson is the missing piece in that complex puzzle, although the model has gone on without it, presuming it to be there, but never actually discovering it.
Have they found it?
Maybe. There are two teams working on two detectors in the LHC (Atlas and CMS) and there are indications that they think they have detected it. It’s hard to know if the particle they have detected is actually the Higgs as the mass of it is still unclear.
When will we know?
Cool your jets. One of the reasons that scientists are being so iffy about what’s going on is that there is a tremendous amount of data to crunch to figure out if what they’re seeing is really the Higgs. That could take months.
What if they never find it, or find something different?
If nothing is found, the entire theories particle physics and beyond are built upon would appear to be a little shaky, and if they find evidence that the Higgs is a misnomer, well that would be even more incredible than actually finding the Higgs, as particle physics would essentially have to be rewritten, given that the Higgs has been presumed to exist since a 1964 paper outlined the theory.
