Physicists Confirm Discovery Of Higgs Boson

Last July, a group of scientists at CERN announced that they had discovered evidence pointing toward the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle whose existence was postulated decades ago but whose existence had never been proven. Today, it’s revealed that they have indeed found the Higgs Boson:

GENEVA (AP) — The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the “God particle.”

The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. Last July, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or was some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data.

“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 physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving several thousand scientists.

Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in the statement. After checking, scientists said the data “strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson.”

A big win for the Large Hardron Collider.

FILED UNDER: Science & Technology,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. al-Ameda says:

    Scientific research is good.

  2. michael reynolds says:

    Yeah, I ran the numbers on this last week and I was pretty confident this was the real thing.

    Now, back to squaring circles.

  3. OzarkHillbilly says:

    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,”

    I find their choice of words quite interesting. (my emphasis)

  4. C. Clavin says:

    I’m just proud as an American that we choose to give tax cuts to rich people instead of funding this kind of research in the US.
    Why in the world would we care about being at the forefront of particle physics?
    Those people in Switzerland and Japan are just so friggin’ crazy.
    Everyone knows that God made the world during a meth fueled 7-day charrette about 6000 years ago. There was no Big Bang. Just some ribs in the garden.
    This Higgs-Bison stuff is just another hoax…like Climate Change and Evolution…a hoax meant to raise funding for the communist perfessors reasearch projects.

  5. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @C. Clavin: You really are good at demonstrating your ignorance, aren’t you?

    We tried it 20 years ago… and the bureaucrats were so bungling and inept and irresponsible that even Bill Clinton had to admit it was a total failure and canceled it.

  6. C. Clavin says:

    Seriously James…
    How long do we have to put up with this commenter?

  7. grumpy realist says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13: I thought it was the fire ants that did in the LLC. That, and it being in Texas.

    Don’t worry. You can sit there smugly in your chair and fulminate about how nasty all those godless communistic furriner scientists are and make sure that the US government never gives a penny to any basic research any more….

    I mean, it’s not your fault if the lead in technology slips away to China and that any grandkids of yours will have to emigrate and learn Chinese if they want a decent life…..

    I swear, some Americans are the dumbest idiots on the planet. This is the equivalent of China’s shutting the door on exploration in the 14th century and {just now} recovering its technological lead vs. the rest of the world.

  8. JKB says:

    @C. Clavin:

    You got something against international cooperation in scientific research?

    Besides, it might have happened this way which is best left to the old country

  9. anjin-san says:

    @ Jenos Idanian #13

    You really are good at demonstrating your ignorance, aren’t you?

    Well, as the saying goes, No One Compares 2U…

  10. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @grumpy realist: Oh, I’m all in favor of funding research — basic and not-so-basic. I’m just a bigger fan of accountability. That means when the people we give a couple of billion to then run up a tab roughly triple the original estimates, we cut the strings and, maybe, find some other people to do the job more honestly and responsibly.

    I’m also a big fan of not giving companies carte blanche to profit exclusively off government-funded research. That’s a big one in pharmaceuticals — they get the government to underwrite the research, then keep all the profits. I think that if we pony up the money, we should get a commensurate cut of the proceeds.

    I’m also a very big supporter of the space program — which is why I was so disgusted when Obama announced that one of NASA’s top priorities was to reach out to Muslims and make them feel better about Islam’s contributions to science — all of which were centuries and centuries ago, of course. I think the last Islamic contributions to science were in the field of self-propelled autonomous explosive devices (suicide bombers), applied pharmacology (rat poison in bombs), and creative aeronautical navigation (9/11).

    On the other hand, the idea of taking a number of Islamists (NOT “Muslims”) and sending them on a mission to the sun has a certain appeal to me…