CERN physicists confident that they have found the Higgs boson

Physicists with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), that reported the possible discovery of the Higgs boson last summer, are now confident that they have, indeed, found the elusive particle.

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The stunning announcement came last July that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had discovered a new particle — a boson, an elementary particle of matter. They had been conducting experiments to find the Higgs boson, the so called 'God Particle', which would prove the existence of the 'Higgs field', which is theorized to be the reason why matter has mass. Think of it like moving through air, and the faster you go, the more resistance the air exerts on you. The Higgs field does the same thing, but for matter moving through the universe, and the 'resistance' that it exerts on matter is what gives that matter its mass.

This new particle definitely fit the description that had been laid down since it was first hypothesized in the 1960s, but they were very careful about their announcement, since it would be some time before they could tell if they had actually found the Higgs boson, or if it was some other particle they hadn't anticipated.

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After careful analysis of their findings, CERN announced today that the data "strongly indicates that it is the Higgs boson."

"The preliminary results with the full set of 2012 data are magnificent, and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, although we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment.

Scientists had been anticipating that this discovery would open up whole new realms of discoveries about the universe, but so far at least, this new particle seems to fit the 'Standard Model' of particle physics view of what the Higgs should look like. Still, this is one more piece to the puzzle of the universe, and further experiments with the Higgs boson could lead to some astounding new discoveries.

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