The God particle

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"SCIENTISTS at the Large Hadron Collider have revealed that they may have glimpsed the Higgs boson "God particle" – the the key to unlocking the universe's mysteries.

Two experiments at the LHC – ATLAS and CMS – have been conducting independent searches for the Higgs.

Sun Professor Brian Cox works on the ATLAS. Here, he offers an insight into what the project has seen.

IN 1964 a physicist called Peter Higgs published a paper in which he said empty space isn't empty.

Instead, it's filled with a soup of particles, and the soup is vast.

Have a look at one of your Christmas presents. Inside the box, Higgs said, there are Higgs particles. Countless billions of them.

The energy they store is greater than that given out by the sun in a thousand years.

And you don't really notice. Except you do, indirectly, because their job is to give mass to the smallest bits of matter in the universe — the subatomic building blocks out of which you are made.

This sounds crazy, and I doubt whether Peter Higgs really believed it when he first proposed it.

But over the decades his theory has weathered everything scientists have been able to throw at it.

When I started my physics career in the 1990s, Higgs' theory was firmly established in the textbooks — but it has always been "just a theory".

In science we need evidence, and that means actually seeing one of these elusive and desperately strange Higgs particles."

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... verse.html

Another Huge reality slap to the physics we think we know. Looks like the next few years could be really exciting....