I think we have it,” said Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN, in an interview from his office outside of Geneva, calling the discovery “a historic milestone.” His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end for one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science. If scientists are lucky, the discovery could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began.
Dr. Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, one of the heaviest subatomic particles yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many particles yet to be discovered . The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. For now, some physicists are calling it a “Higgs-like” particle.
“It’s great to discover a new particle but you have find out what its properties are,” said John Ellis, a theorist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Rese...
Full Article Here:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-may-have-discovered-higgs-boson-particle.html?_r=1
Crazy!!! First Paramount and J.J. Abrams recently and briefly unveil their low-budget sci-fi movie about these things titled, "God Particle" and NPR has been talking about CERN and these subatomic particles all week! Who knows where this will lead!