It’s being hailed as the discovery that will unlock the secrets of the universe.
Boffins at research centre CERN in Switzerland believe they have finally found the elusive “God particle” – after months of experiments with the vast underground Large Hadron Collider.
Sun Professor Brian Cox has been involved with the multi-million-pound project from the start.
Here, he explains why this scientific discovery is the most important of his lifetime:
Yesterday's announcement of the discovery at CERN of a new particle, which looks very much like a Higgs particle, is probably the greatest scientific moment in my lifetime, and one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
Let me explain why.
Back in the Sixties, Peter Higgs and others were involved in trying to make a theory, known as the Standard Model, make sense.
The Standard Model is a mathematical description of nature.
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| Invention: the Large Hadron Collider |
It contains all the sub-atomic building blocks of the universe, and describes how they interact with each other through three of the four known forces.
Those forces are the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces that operate deep within the heart of matter, and gravity.
Only the force of gravity stands stubbornly outside of the Standard Model.
If you want to know how the molecules that make up your body stick together in the way they do; how the sun shines; why the sky is blue; why water is a liquid at the temperatures found on Earth or even why you don’t fall through the floor when your atoms are mostly empty space — the answers are contained within the equations of the Standard Model.
It is the most accurate and successful description of the natural world we have, and as such it is one of the great achievements of 20th Century science.
It does, however, make a very weird prediction that, until yesterday, was merely conjecture.
The Standard Model says that empty space is not empty. Instead, it is crammed full of Higgs particles.
Every little cube of space in front of your eyes now, every little cube of space inside your body and every little cube of space everywhere in the universe is literally full of them.
Nearly 90 countries came together at CERN, a laboratory in Geneva, to share their expertise, and the cost, to build the most complex machine ever assembled.
In doing so, they pioneered some of the most exciting and useful technologies in the world today, from the World Wide Web to medical imaging machines such as PET scanners and proton beam therapy treatments for cancer.
But what they really wanted to do was explore the universe, because they were curious.
So they built a tunnel, 16 miles in circumference, and placed inside it two beams of particles travelling at 99.999999 per cent the speed of light.
They arranged for these beams to collide together, recreating the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, up to 600million times every second.
They built two giant detectors, called ATLAS and CMS, to photograph these collisions, collected the images on thousands of terabytes of computer disks, and built a whole new World Wide Web called The Grid to search through them.
And yesterday, after sifting through billions upon billions of pictures, they announced that they had found a few hundred collisions in which never-before-seen particles — almost certainly Higgs particles — were produced, proving a 50-year old theory based on mathematical elegance.
I am reminded of a quote from a hero of mine, Sir Humphry Davy. He was a scientist who lived and worked at the turn of the 19th Century, a time that has been called The Age Of Wonder.
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