It has been fancifully dubbed the angel of creation and, to the particular scorn of physicists, the “God particle”. The Higgs Boson is said to have appeared out of the chaos of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and turned the flying debris from that primeval explosion into galaxies, stars, and planets.
Its formal discovery will be the greatest advance in knowledge of the universe in decades. But until now, in four decades of research, no one has claimed to have more than seen a hint of the Higgs Boson.
This may soon change. On Wednesday at the CERN particle physics research centre, two teams of “Higgs Hunters” may well announce they have spotted it. Or at least something that looks incredibly like it. Says Oliver Buchmueller, a senior scientist: “If it walks like a Higgs and quacks like a Higgs, then we have to at least consider the possibility we have a prominent new member of the Boson family on our hands.”