Word: boson
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...level. The victory was a long time coming for CERN, Europe's nuclear-research group, which for 15 years has pumped $10 billion into the setback-plagued project. The experiments are expected to reveal much about the nature of the universe, including other dimensions, dark matter and the Higgs boson, the particle that could explain how energy from the Big Bang turned into mass...
...first and most important order of business is to prove (or disprove) the existence of a single particle known as the Higgs boson - a speck so precious that it has come to be called the "God particle," a reference to the theory that Higgs gives mass to all matter in the cosmos...
...find the Higgs boson is to create an environment that mimics the moment post-Big Bang. The powerful LHC runs at up to 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) and sends particles through temperatures colder than deep space at velocities approaching the speed of light. (The second most powerful particle accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, runs at 1 TeV.) The added juice allows scientists to get closer to the high energy that existed after the Big Bang. And high energies are needed, because the Higgs is thought to be quite heavy. (In Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, C represents...
...plug a hole in the so-called Standard Model - the far-reaching set of equations that incorporates all that is known about the interaction of subatomic particles and is the closest thing physicists have to a testable "theory of everything." But many theoreticians feel that even if the Higgs boson exists, the Standard Model is unsatisfactory; for instance, it is unable to explain the presence of gravity, or the existence of something called "dark matter," which prevents spiral galaxies like our Milky Way from falling apart. Even the mighty Higgs cannot explain those mysteries - though through telescopes and observation...