Have Scientists at CERN Discovered the Elusive Higgs Boson?

Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear physics laboratory in Geneva, will announce Wednesday if they have found a long-sought fundamental particle called the Higgs boson.

The search for this particle, which some have dubbed the “God particle,” has taken decades of work and billions of dollars.

Anchor Aaron Schachter talks to journalist Ian Sample, author of the book “Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science.”

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Aaron Schachter: I’m Aaron Schachter, this is The World. Tomorrow morning could bring the biggest news in physics in decades — an announcement is scheduled at the European Nuclear Research Facility known as CERN, which is home to the atom smasher called the Large Hadron Collider. Tomorrow, scientists at CERN will say if they’ve discovered an elusive subatomic particle. It’s officially called the Higgs boson, but informally it’s been dubbed the God Particle. Journalist Ian Sample has written about the international race to find the Higgs Boson. His book is titled Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science. Ian, you’re in London, but I understand you’re about to head to Geneva for the announcement? First off, do we know that the team in Geneva will say?

Ian Sample: All of the suggestion seems to point in the same direction which is that they will probably come out and say we have seen something in our experiments that looks very much like a Higgs boson. I think other scientists will say it’s pretty much there apart from the paperwork, it’s, I think they’re gonna be close enough that confirmation will be something of formality.

Schachter: Okay, let’s backup for a moment. What is this thing?

Sample: Well, the Higgs boson is really just a particle that is associated with a field, and it’s the field that’s interesting. It would be something new that we didn’t know was their. And it’s role is to give the really basic particles, the basic building blocks of matter their weight. And if they don’t have weight they move around at the speed of light and don’t have planets, or stars or life.

Schachter: Now, as you say, in order to find the Higgs boson particle scientists smash atoms together at extremely high speeds in these particle accelerators. This is a huge cost for this thing, isn’t it?

Sample: Yeah, but it’s, there’s an interesting thing that happens here and it’s somewhat driven by this sort of the PR that comes out of CERN and also by the rest of the media where we sort of, we leap on the Higgs boson as the, the sole reason for the Large Hadron Collider. Now, it’s true that the Large Hadron Collider was built with the Higgs particle in mind, but it’s not true that that’s all it’s about.

Schachter: You’ve talked about CERN, the CERN lab there in Switzerland. Scientists on this side of the Atlantic at Fermilab outside Chicago have also been searching for the Higgs particle and doing some of the other work you mentioned. And in fact, just yesterday they announced that they’ve come tantalizingly close to confirming that the particle exists. If the European team tomorrow says that they have indeed found it, is that a win for Europe, a loss for the United States?

Sample: If CERN say they’ve pretty much got this particle, I think it will undoubtedly be just by dent of geography be seen as success for Europe. But the US have been paying an awful lot of money into the LHC and into CERN because they realize that is really where the game is at, and if they’re not involved in CERN at a greater level then they really are out of the game.

Schachter: Well, given that and aside from the lovely media quality of it all, why is it called the God particle?

Sample: Well, this was really something that came about in 1993 when much to the disappointment of a lot of the physicists, it was the director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman in Chicago who wrote a book on the Higgs boson which he called The God Particle. And it really came about from his publisher looking for some other phrase than Higgs boson to put on the cover. So it was a marketing stunt, but the name stuck. And the director of Fermilab was a Nobel Prize winner and an incredibly accomplished physicist in his own right. So you know, a Nobel physicist names a particle, the God Particle, it probably does have a certain media attraction to it more so than the Higgs boson. And the media ran with it. Physicists have hated it ever since.

Schachter: Ian Sample is a science journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian. He wrote a book about the Higgs boson. It’s called Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science. Ian, thank you so much.

Sample: Thank you.

Schachter: You can find out a lot more about the Higgs boson from our partners at the PBS program NOVA and you can watch scientists make their announcement live from Geneva. We’ve got links at theworld.org.

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Watch The Higgs Particle Matters on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Watch a popular rap about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider below: