"This is just the beginning,"
Higgs deserved a Nobel Prize:Stephen Hawking
The 70-year-old theoretical physicist lost a 100-dollar bet as he believed that the Higgs Boson
wouldn't be found.
"I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.
It seems I have just lost 100 dollars," the Telegraph quoted Hawking as saying.
When Higgs first proposed that an invisible field strewn across space gave mass to the building
blocks of the universe, the theory was ridiculed by some of the most respected minds of the
time.
His first paper was rejected by a journal, while other scientists accused him and his colleagues
of failing to grasp the basic principles of physics.
Despite the sleights Higgs, at the time a 34-year-old physicist at Edinburgh University, was
convinced that his idea was right although he never envisaged being able to prove it.
48 years on, his radical concept was finally proved correct by an international team of
physicists at the CERN laboratory using a 6-billion-pound piece of equipment, designed to
uncover the secrets of the Universe, on Wednesday.
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A closer look at the Higgs boson
The magnet core of the world`s largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS, Compact Muon
Solenoid), one of the experiments preparing to take data at European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN)`s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator is seen, near Genva.
BERLIN: Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher near Geneva have announced the
discovery of a new subatomic particle that looks remarkably like the long-sought Higgs boson.
Sometimes called the "God particle" because its existence is fundamental to the creation of the
universe, the hunt for the Higgs involved thousands of scientists from all over the world.
WHAT IS THE GOD PARTICLE ANYWAY?
School physics teaches that everything is made up of atoms, and inside atoms are electrons,
protons and neutrons. They, in turn, are made of quarks and other subatomic particles.
Scientists have long puzzled over how these minute building blocks of the universe acquire mass.
Without mass, particles wouldn't hold together and there would be no matter.
One theory proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs and teams in Belgium and the United States
in the 1960s is that a new particle must be creating a "sticky" field that acts as a drag on
other particles. The atom-smashing experiments at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear
Research, have now captured a glimpse of what appears to be just such a Higgs-like particle.
This image shows a typical candidate event including two high-energy photons whose energy
(depicted by red towers) is measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines
are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
The Higgs is part of many theoretical equations underpinning scientists' understanding of how
the world came into being. If it doesn't exist, then those theories would need to be
fundamentally overhauled. The fact that it apparently does exist means scientists have been on
the right track with their theories. But there's a twist: the measurements seem to diverge
slightly from what would be expected under the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.
This is exciting for scientists because it opens the possibility to potential new discoveries
including a theory known as "super-symmetry" where particles don't just come in pairs - think
matter and anti-matter - but quadruplets, all with slightly different characteristics.
HOW MUCH DID IT COST?
CERN's atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, alone cost some $10 billion to build and run.
This includes the salaries of thousands of scientists and support staff around the world who
collaborated on the two experiments that independently pursued the Higgs.
WERE THERE ANY PRACTICAL RESULTS FROM THE SEARCH?
Not directly. But the massive scientific effort that led up to the discovery has paid off in
other ways, one of which was the creation of the World Wide Web. CERN scientists developed it to
make it easier to exchange information among each other. The vast computing power needed to
crunch all of the data produced by the atom smasher has also boosted the development of
distributed or cloud computing, which is now making its way into mainstream services. Advances
in solar energy capture, medical imaging and proton therapy used in the fight against cancer
have also resulted from the work of particle physicists at CERN and elsewhere.
WHAT'S NEXT
"This is just the beginning," says James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN. Scientists will keep
probing the new particle until they fully understand how it works. In doing so they hope to
understand the 96 percent of the universe that remains hidden from view. This may result in the
discovery of new particles and even hitherto unknown forces of nature.
