Word: boson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What physicists think they'll see is a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson. Quantum physicists have never really explained why protons, neutrons and all the things made out of them have mass, and they believe the elusive Higgs is what gives it to them. "If we didn't find the Higgs," says Lisa Randall, a Harvard theorist, "it would be shocking...
...prize discovery will be a particle, the Higgs Boson, which scientists believe gives everything in the universe its mass (some physicists call it the God Particle). Previous detectors at CERN and Fermilab near Chicago have failed to find the elusive Higgs, and a planned supercollider in Texas designed to confirm its existence was never finished after Congress cancelled funding in 1993. Now that the LHC is on the quest, some observers herald Europe as the new center of pure scientific research...
...results will help fill in gaps in the Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of subatomic particles that is the closest that modern physics comes to a testable "theory of everything." For example, scientists believe the LHC will produce a particle, the Higgs Boson, that will end debate over how matter in the universe acquires mass. It could even provide evidence for more ambitious theories of the universe, such as string theory, which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, the previously known laws of the small and large that are currently incompatible in the Standard...
...once has been able to find the Higgs boson in the stream of debris emitted when two particles are smashed together at high speeds. Scientists at another CERN particle collider, LEP, felt they came close before the accelerator shut down in 2000. Scientists using the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab near Chicago are still hoping to publish a discovery before CERN starts analyzing data later this year. Higgs says he is 90% sure that the LHC will find it, but he doesn't have the final word. "With all respect to our theoretician friends, experiments find out the truth," explains Tejinder...
Higgs jokes that he now tells his doctors to do whatever's necessary to keep him alive until the data from the accelerator can be analyzed. He has his professional reasons for wanting to see his theory confirmed. For the rest of us, solid proof of the Higgs boson would provide a cosmic solace: that beauty and unity exist at the very foundation of the universe, however rare they sometimes seem in the world...