This story was originally posted to the Colgate University news site by Matt Hames.
Ho Science Center at Colgate University
Last week, scientists discovered what might be a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson (a k a The God Particle).
Colgate alumnus Ben Cerio ’07, currently a research assistant at Duke University, was part of this exciting discovery.
“The discovery has very deep implications about the origin of mass in the universe” reports Cerio, who is confident that it is the elusive Higgs boson, adding: “Both teams announced discoveries yesterday with a statistical confidence of “five sigma,” which means that the probability that it is a fluctuation, and not actually a particle, is one in a million!”
The Higgs boson particle was proposed by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Since that time, scientists have tried to build particle accelerators that could smash protons together with enough energy to uncover elusive particles.
The Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever built, went online in 2010 and appears to be fulfilling the promise of finding these elusive particles.
Your turn: what do you think this discovery will mean for science?