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Surprising Science — April 13, 2011

The God Particle

Researchers say they are ahead of schedule in a bid to discover (or disprove) the mysterious “God particle”–the stuff that makes stuff stuff. How else do objects get their mass?

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What’s the Big Idea?

Scientists in Switzerland are striving to prove or disprove the existence of a mysterious particle–the “God particle” or the “stuff that makes stuff stuff”. Particle physicists have posited that this particle, the Higgs boson, is the missing link in explaining how objects get their mass.

What’s the Latest Development?

Things have apparently been going so well at the Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland, that plans to temporarily close it down at the end of 2011 have been postponed a year. The collider is the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator and physicists say its performance has exceeded all expectations. One says that they have obtained so much data, “they may be able to discover the Higgs boson within two years, rather than five.”

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