Today, scientists at CERN announced the discovery of a particle that is consistent with the predicted Higgs Boson particle.
Essentially, there is a Standard Model of particle physics, which says that there should be 12 fields that make up everything in the universe, and that there is a particle associated with each field. There have so far been observations made of 11 of the 12 fields/particles. And for about 45 years, scientists have been hunting for the missing 12th field.
Professor Peter Higgs, at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of this 12th field, the so-called Higgs field in the 1960s. This idea is that interactions between the Higgs field and the other 11 fields give things mass. The Higgs field explains why things are solid, why our feet don't just go straight through the floor, why things have mass.
It is this particle that physicists working on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN have been searching for. They have basically been banging particles together really hard, hoping that one of the explosions caused would spit out a Higgs particle. And this morning it seems that their search may be nearing it's conclusion.
(Source)
The particle discovery announced earlier today is not definitively the Higgs particle, but it is definitely something new - a new boson. And the likelihood is that it is the missing Higgs boson. The director-general of Cern, Professor Rolf Heuer, said this morning - "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."
It is a very exciting day for science. Watching the announcement unfold online was thrilling, and I am very glad that I am alive to witness it.
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