Higgs Boson Found: CERN Physisicts Now Confident That Last Year's Results Confirm Existence of "God Particle"

CERN physicists announced Thursday that they believe they have discovered the elusive Higgs boson, a hypothesized sub-atomic particle that is considered a key building block of the known universe.

The physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) discovered the particle last July during tests of the Large Hadron Collider, a $10 billion 17-mile long atom smasher used to test high-energy collisions of sub-atomic particles. However, they were reluctant to say that the particle they discovered was indeed the Higgs boson.  They have finished combing through the data from that test and are fairly confident that they have discovered the so-called "God particle."

The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a leading physicist  at CERN.

While CERN would not confirm 100% that they had found the Higgs boson, they did say that the data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson."

The researchers said they must evaluate "much more data" before they can fully confirm the particle's existence.

The Higgs boson, or more correctly other particles interaction with it, is what gives objects in the universe mass, size and shape. The stronger the attraction, the more mass an object has, according to the theory. The Higgs boson has been a missing ingredient of our understanding of the universe. All of our current models predict that it exists, but it has never been confirmed through observation.

If it ever turns out that the Higgs boson does not exist, several key theories of the universe will have to be overhauled including the well-known Big Bang theory.

Are you excited for this discovery?

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