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In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they've discovered the elusive "God Particle," aka the Higgs boson.

For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chaos of the universe could coalesce into planets and, eventually, life. Since 1994, Southern Methodist University physics professor Ryszard Stroynowski has been involved in the construction of a device that could detect the presence of the Higgs in the Large Hadron Collider. Back in December, the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced they'd narrowed their search down to a small range of masses. Reached Tuesday, he was tight-lipped about Wednesday's announcement.

"I'm involved with (one of two CERN experiments, known as ATLAS) and I can tell you that we're confident and that we have enough data to cover whatever statements we're making," Stroynowski tells Unfair Park. The wording of that statement, though, will be carefully couched.

Two anonymous CERN researchers leaked to the journal Nature the discovery of a new particle. But is it the Higgs, or something they hadn't counted on?

"By tomorrow, we will say we found something. The wording will be official wording from the lab," Stroynowski says. "We definitely have a strong indication for something we haven't seen before."

What that something is would do nothing less than explain gravity and the creation of the universe.

"It's like opening a door to a completely new field, so it's really exciting," he says. "I have never seen what I call 'Higgs-teria' at this level. The amount of interest in the media is something which I have never seen in my entire professional life, over 40 years now."

The announcement should come at around 2 a.m. our time. http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2012/07/smu_prof_involved_i
n_god_parti.php

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There's a 5-in-10 million chance that this is a fluke. That was enough for physicists to declare that the Higgs boson – the world's most-wanted particle – has been discovered. Rapturous applause, whistles and cheers filled the auditorium at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

Almost 50 years after its existence was first predicted, the breakthrough means that the standard model of particle physics, which explains all known particles and the forces that act upon them, is now complete.

A Higgs boson with a mass of around 125 to 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) was seen separately by the twin CMS and ATLAS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, each with a confidence level of 5 sigma, or standard deviations, the heads of the experiments announced today at CERN.

Even by particle physicists' strict standards, that's statistically significant enough to count as a particle discovery.

"I think we have it," said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, as he concluded a hotly-anticipated seminar, which began today at 9am local time.

Around the world the results were being watched at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22014-celebrations-as-higgs-boso
n-is-finally-discovered.html, are gearing up:

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Physicists propose factory to spew out Higgs particles

No sooner has one mammoth accelerator delivered its first big result, than discussions begin on what should replace it.

At the annual get-together of Nobel prizewinners in Lindau, Germany, this week, all the talk was of whether the Large Hadron Collider is the right instrument to find out what exactly the LHC has found.

The problem is that the LHC collides two beams of protons. Protons are made of a melange of smaller particles, quarks and the gluons that hold them together, so when two of them hit, the result is a confusing array of shrapnel.

Finding something that looks like the Higgs boson has required painstaking reconstructions of what was fleetingly produced in the violence of the collisions. So much different stuff is produced that it might simply be too confusing an environment in which to pin down with any certainly what the putative Higgs's true properties are, and so reach a conclusive identification.

"The question is, will the LHC be able to do it at all? Or do we need something else?" says Carlo Rubbia, an experimentalist who as the head of CERN, Europe's particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, played a major part in getting the LHC project off the ground in the 1990s.More at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22021-physicists-propose-factory
-to-spew-out-higgs-particles.html]