The head of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced yesterday on the 4th of july that its teams have discovered a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson, or as it's commonly referred to as the "God Particle".
"We have a discovery [that is] consistent with a Higgs boson," Rolf Heuer, director of CERN, the European research center, said Wednesday.
"As a layman, I think we did it," he added. "We have a discovery. We have observed a new particle that is consistent with a Higgs boson."
So why is it important and gaining so much attention? Well that one little particle could explain how matter attains mass and help explain the workings of our entire universe.
Physicists say the Higgs boson would help explain how we, and the rest of the universe, exist. It would explain why the matter created in the Big Bang has mass, and can coalesce.
Without it, as CERN explained in a paper released to the public, "the universe would be a very different place ... no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people."
The team is calling the results "very preliminary," but it's enough to have the science community breaking out the champagne.
The leaders of the two CERN teams -- Joe Incandela, head of CMS with 2,100 scientists, and Fabiola Gianotti, head of ATLAS with 3,000 scientists -- each presented in complicated scientific terms what was essentially extremely strong evidence of a new particle.
Incandela said it was too soon to say definitively whether it is the "standard model" Higgs that Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others predicted in the 1960s, part of a standard model theory of physics involving an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
Watch a video of the "God Particle" Announcement at CERN:
