Skip to main content

CERN: Higgs boson ‘God particle’ likely does not exist

higgs-boson-god-particle
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Scientists have discovered why the infamous Higgs boson particle, also known as the “God particle,” has been so hard to find: it probably doesn’t exist. This disappointing proclamation comes from scientists at CERN, who told the crowd at last week’s Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India, that their research shows a 95 percent probability that the hypothetical Higgs boson particle is nothing more than a figment of our imagination.

In the physics world this is a big, big deal. First postulated by three independent groups of physicists in the 1960s, the Higgs boson (named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs) has been long-believed by many in the physics community to be the elementary particle responsible for sparking the Big Bang, and thus the entire universe and everything in it. (This is why they call it the God particle.) If discovered, Higgs boson would provide the missing link for the “standard model” of particle physics, and could even usher in all-new types of physics.

While many have attempted to find concrete evidence of Higgs boson, the most promising endeavor has been carried out by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In fact, discovering the Higgs boson is one of the primary purposes of the LHC, which took 16 years and $10 billion to build.

The LHC, which measures 17 miles in circumference, has been called the “Big Bang Machine” because its purpose is to collide particles together at mind-blowing speeds — much as they are believed to have collided in pre-time — enabling scientists to observe the effects of such collisions. It was through these types experiments that CERN scientists hoped they would discover the elusive Higgs boson — and which they’ve now realized that it may not exist at all.

So, what does the probable absence of the Higgs boson mean for the rest of us? Well, first, it means we, as a people, remain as far as ever from discovering how our universe came into existence — a question humanity has been trying to answer presumably since the beginning of our own creation.

Another, less profound, but far more obnoxious, outcome is that people who choose to dismiss science altogether simply because it doesn’t have the all the answers (in this case, the answer to, “How did we come to exist in the first place?”) will have new ammunition for their arguments. So, don’t be surprised when CERN’s troublesome admission that Higgs boson is likely a myth is cited as a reason that global warming doesn’t exist.

[Image via Anna RubaK/Shutterstock]

Editors' Recommendations

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more