One Step Closer to Finding the God Particle

The God Particle, or the Higgs Boson as its known in the Physics world, is coming closer and closer to being found. (I recently wrote an article  about the Higgs, you can check it out here for a bit of background info)

Experimenters at Fermilab, which is a particle accelerator laboratory in the United States, are competing with Europeans at the new-fangled Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

They are competing for the ultimate prize: finding the Higgs Boson, and experimenters at Fermilab just narrowed the search a bit.

I see this competition like a nerdy version of Rocky IV. Fermilab is Rocky, the hard-nosed American underdog (Fermilab is much less powerful than the LHC) and the LHC is the engineered Russian super-athlete.

Fermilab vs. LHC

One of the biggest problems with finding the Higgs is that no one knows exactly what its mass is (i.e. how heavy it is). But we do know that the mass should be between 114 and 185 GeV/c²

Oh, and  GeV/c2 is a unit of mass that particle physicists use. I’m not gonna go into a whole lot of detail, but for comparisons sake the proton is roughly 1 GeV/c²

So the Higgs boson is supposed be roughly between 114 and 185 times larger than the proton.

But Fermilab just released some results which showed that the Higgs is NOT between the masses of 158 and 175 GeV/c²

So this narrows the search parameters a little bit, and hopefully it results in finding the Higgs a bit sooner.

Of course, NOT finding the Higgs boson would just as huge a result. It would mean the Universe is a whole lot weirder than we already thought, and there are those who think we won’t find it.

So exciting times in physics world. But of course its ALWAYS exciting in the physics world! You can try and keep up with all the excitement by following me on Twitter