Forty-eight years after it was first theorized by British physicist Peter Higgs, the notoriously elusive Higgs Boson has emerged from the wreckage of over one trillion proton collisions conducted by researchers at the CERN facility outside Geneva. After almost four years of searching using the Large Hadron Collider (a 6.4 billion dollar, subterranean instrument whose turning on in 2008 sparked media fears of an earth-swallowing black hole which, strangely, failed to materialize), physicists from two separate teams working at CERN have announced findings of a five sigma grade (a one in 3.5 million chance of error) which point to the existence of the infamous boson–thought to give mass to all other particles in the universe.
While those involved insist that more tests must be conducted in order to be sure of the identity of the particle, there is no doubt that this find represents one of the most important scientific discoveries in the last 100 years–a period that has not been lacking in scientific discoveries. Said Higgs, now 83 years old, “I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge.” // Patrick Barrett
