One of the biggest questions in science - does 'the God particle' exist? - is likely to be answered by the end of next year, it was claimed yesterday.The Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle, is theoretically responsible for mass, without which there would be no gravity and no universe.
Until now the enormous energies needed to winkle out the Higgs from the building blocks of matter have not been available.
Scientists at the world's most powerful particle accelerator have today predicted that within two years they will either find the Higgs boson or show conclusively that it does not exist.
Even the discovery that nature does not contain a Higgs particle will be a momentous event in physics. If this was shown to be true, scientists might have to abandon the 'Standard Model', the best theory so far for explaining the fundamental mechanics of the universe.
The search for the Higgs boson is taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which fills a 27-kilometre circular tunnel 100 metres below the French-Swiss border near Geneva.
Dubbed the 'Big Bang machine', the LHC was built at a cost of around £2.6billion to recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe.
The machine, weighing more than 38,000 tonnes, accelerates streams of protons - the 'hearts' of atoms - close to the speed of light and smashes them into each other at unprecedented energies.
Huge detectors at four points in the tunnel use the collisions to probe deeper into the nature of reality than anyone has gone before. Read More
