- Scientists 'will say they are 99.99% certain' the particle has been found
- Leading physicists have been invited to event - sparking speculation that Higgs Boson particle has been found
- 'God Particle' gives particles that make up atoms their mass
By Rob Cooper
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Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed.
Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.
The particle accelerator: It is within these tubes that physicists are hunting for the 'God' particle
Physicists first predicted that the Higgs Boson subatomic particle exists 48 years ago.
Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland.
Invite: Peter Higgs, the professor the particle is named after, has been asked to attend the press conference at Cern
The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results - so they are 99.99995 per cent sure - such is the significance of the results.
Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend.
He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'
The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass.
Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.
The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons â€" sub-atomic particles â€" together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
If the physicists’ theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying.
An aerial view of the Swiss-French border, indicating the route of the Large Hadron Collider
This decay would leave behind a ‘footprint’ that would show up as a bump in their graphs.
However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel - there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.
Now it is thought that two separate teams of scientists, who run independent experiments in secret from each other, have both uncovered evidence of the particle.
However, the two groups, CMS and ATLAS, are expected to stop short of confirming its existence.
Inside: The giant project is the most enormous piece of scientific apparatus ever constructed, and is buried 100m beneath the ground
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its funny they are already at sigma 4 for finding the higgs boson aka the Goddamn particle (origional name that a researcher gave it) aka the god particle. What it does for society will not be seen in the near future however scientifically, if this is the particle that gives mass to objects and the higgs field causes drag on the particle then we will have an idea for a way to cancel that field to a degree and viola we have inertial dampeners ala Star Trek as well as a way to reach the speed of light without the limitations that e=mc2 places
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Clinical studies conducted at the shanty, the compound created by the Disgruntled Old Coot declares that the boson is a false positive claimed to be factual in order to obtain additional funding.
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What amazes me are the pictures that are with this article. Just stop for a second and look at them! Someone (or group of someones) actually thought this thing up and built it. Doesn't that frighten you just a little? It is bad enough being in my head but to be in theirs and able to think and dream at that level?
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What does this do for the world problems of resources and food? absolutely nothing, what a waste of money.
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So they found the "God" partiicle but where does it come from?
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I had great sport at the front door with this with a couple of JO-HO's today!! Cool.
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So God is a particle. I always thought he might turn out to be a dog.
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...It is there solely to employ 100's of would be out of work scientists who cannot put there talents to something that would benefit mankind !! - Cedric Hickinbottom, UK, 1/7/2012 15:48 ----- Oh, because you have contributed more to mankind's intelligence than the people who work at CERN have you?
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Reading articles of this quality, and the subsequent, associated comments gives me ample reason to conclude there is little to be gained in the name of intelligence. The idle banter between two classes, those who think they know it all, and those who know nothing (close relatives, by the way), is simply pathetic. I'm most surprised they are fluent enough to communicate, albeit incomplete thought, void of substance and purpose. Perhaps the scientists should consider placing the bickering lot inside the collider and fling their carcasses at 186,000 Mps to see if the resulting collision would yield one single brain cell.
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Amazing, the majority of this was paid for by the uk tax payer, money well spent i say more investment we are entering a new age in scientiffic discovery!!!!!!
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