'God particle' will be found
2008-04-08 14:19
Geneva - British physicist Peter Higgs
said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence
of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life
possible - as he first argued 40 years ago.
Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson",
which originates from the force, will be found when a vast
particle collider at the Cern research centre on the
Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.
"The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty
quickly ... I'm more than 90% certain that it will,"
Higgs told journalists.
The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to
explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were
dismissed at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear
Research.
Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely
accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being
milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15
billion years ago.
Finding the Higgs boson would prove this theory right.
Cern's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to simulate
conditions at the time of that primeval inferno by smashing
particles together at near light-speed and so unlock many
secrets of the universe.
Higgs was in Geneva to visit Cern for the first time in 13
years in advance of the launch.
Scientists at the centre hope the process will produce clear
signs of the boson, dubbed the "God particle" by some, to the
displeasure of Higgs, an atheist.
He came up with his theory to explain why mass disappears as
matter is broken down to its smallest constituent parts -
molecules, atoms and quarks.
Big bang
The normally media-shy physicist, who has spent most of his
career at Scotland's Edinburgh University, postulated that
matter was weightless at the exact moment of the Big Bang and
then much of it promptly gained mass.
This, he argued, must be due to a field which stuck to
particles as they passed through it and made them heavy. If this
had not happened, matter would have floated free in space and
stars and planets would never have formed.
Higgs said he hoped the elusive boson - which an earlier
but less powerful collider at Cern and another at the US
Fermilab had failed to detect - would be identified before his
80th birthday in 2009.
"If it doesn't," he said, "I shall be very, very puzzled."
But there may be no immediate visible proof - despite some
fanciful portrayals of what it might look like - of the boson's
appearance on the ultra-sophisticated computers used by Cern
scientists to track the billions of collisions in the LHC.
"It all happens so fast that the appearance of the boson may
be hidden in the data collected, and it could take a long time
for the analysis to find it," said Higgs.
"I may have to keep the champagne on ice for a while yet."