• 
• Tweet

• Tweet

The particle accelerator: It is within these tubes that physicists are hunting for the 'God' particle

Leonard and Sheldon have been talking about this for over 5 seasons now.

On July 4th, The Daily Mail is reporting that the big-brain folks at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson ‘God Particle’ has been found.

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.

For us who do not have a PHD in physics… What does this mean to the average person?

For simplistic purposes, consider mass to be what we ‘weigh’ when we put something on a weight scale. Photons would not ever weigh anything, no matter how massive a planet or sun their weight was measured on.

An aerial view of the Swiss-French border, indicating the route of the Large Hadron Collider

Gravity can affect these items but cannot not make them ‘weigh’ anything, or more accurately, have any mass. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle which would allow this type of behavior to occur. It is that particle which causes things to have mass, at least theoretically, by interacting with atoms or the components of atoms. Scientists were able to predict that IF the Higgs Boson existed it had to be found at a certain energy level.

The Large Hadron Collider is the first man made detector capable of producing the energy required to find the Higgs Boson. If they found it within the energy range that theory predicted then it may finally allow physicists to tie gravity to the other forces. If not, then physics has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

Higgs is the name of the man who figured out what the mass/energy level of the particle which causes mass would have to be.
Physicists first predicted that the Higgs Boson subatomic particle exists 48 years ago.

This is why I watch the Big Bang Theory.

The giant project is the most enormous piece of scientific apparatus ever constructed, and is buried 100m beneath the ground

UPDATE: At a meeting held at CERN this morning, scientists presented the latest results from the search for the long-sought Higgs particle. After 30 years of research and $9 billion of investment, they’ve changed the face of physics forever: they’ve found the Higgs boson.

Fabiola Gianotti, from the ATLAS experiment, explains.