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Genesis machine at work

It is one of the most puzzling missing pieces in physicists’ understanding of the universe. But the British scientist behind the so-called “God particle” believes the hunt for his elusive prediction may soon be over.

Peter Higgs, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Edinburgh, has said he was 90 per cent confident that a €3-billion atom-smashing machine nearing completion in Switzerland would prove him right by showing that the particle exists. Professor Higgs, now 78, said he hoped this would happen before his 80th birthday on May 29, 2009.

“If that mass prediction is right it will be in the data very quickly,” he said, “but then there’s a lot of analysis of the data to be done before you announce it and that’s what takes the time.”

If proved correct, Professor Higgs said he would uncork a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Many physicists believe he would also be a shoo-in for a Nobel prize, along with two other physicists who made significant advances in the same field.

The big hope for finding the Higgs boson — the particle that confers mass on the rest of matter — is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory, near Geneva.

By crunching together particles at high speed and energy, the machine is designed to recreate conditions that have not existed since just after the Big Bang.

“This is a Genesis machine,” said theoretical physicist Professor Michio Kaku, of City University in New York. “[It] will help us to unlock the secret of the origin of the universe.”

Finding the Higgs boson would add significant experimental backing to physicists’ current theory for understanding how matter is put together, the so-called standard model. But Professor Higgs said the LHC was about much more than just the God particle.

Following two public open days at the weekend, engineers will seal off the particle accelerator and cool it to minus 271.3 degrees Celcius. They hope to switch on the first beam in late June or early July, and the first collisions should happen by the end of the year. It will probably be 12 months before the LHC is at full power. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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