"God particle" discovered... well, nearly: Scientists set to announce they have proof it exists without having seen it

"God particle" discovered... well, nearly: Scientists set to announce they have proof it exists without having seen it

Scientists are almost ready to announce that the elusive “God particle”, which they say explains the Universe, exists.

The Higgs boson sub-atomic particle, nicknamed the God particle, is theoretically responsible for mass, without which there would be no gravity and no universe.

Now boffins at are expected to announce on Wednesday that they have enough evidence to show that Higgs boson “almost certainly” exists.

The search for the Higgs boson is taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which fills a 27-kilometre circular tunnel 100 metres below the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

However, researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say they are not quite ready to say they have “discovered” the particle.

Instead, experts say that the data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson - all but proving it exists - but does not allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.

It appears to be a fine distinction.

Senior CERN scientists say the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN’s vast complex on the Swiss-French border on Wednesday are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one.

“I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, ‘It looks like a discovery,”’ said British theoretical physicist John Ellis from King’s College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s.

“We’ve discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs.”

Higgs is fundamental to deciding what is matter and what isn’t. 

If it doesn’t exist scientists would have to rip up their particle physics books and start again.

The search for Higgs is the greatest scientific race of the modern era.

CERN’s atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorise occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

For particle physicists, finding the Higgs boson is a key to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed.

Diagrams explaining the search for the Higgs subatomic particle