Higgs is dead.
September 12, 2011 - McGill Daily - There's probably no God (particle) - During the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics hosted in late-July at Grenoble, the latest data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was presented. After years of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be built and brought up to operational levels, and after numerous frustrating technical setbacks, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was ready to present its first tenuous conclusions about the Higgs boson. It was there that they dropped the bombshell: CERN had effectively ruled out its probable existence with a 95 per cent certainty rate. The Higgs boson, popularly known as the “god particle” because of its supposed role in endowing all everything in the universe with mass, has been furiously searched for since the postulation of its existence in 1964. The Standard Model predicts a menagerie of subatomic particles, of these, the Higgs boson is the only one yet to be confirmed. As a scientific theory, the Standard Model is the most thoroughly tested in all of human history. It successfully unites electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that keeps atomic nuclei together, and the weak nuclear force that controls radioactive decay under one theoretical framework. The Standard Model essentially says that all matter in the universe is composed of varying combinations of fundamental units called fermions of which there are two types: quarks and leptons. There are six flavours of quarks and leptons respectively, with antiparticles for each. The combination of these 24 different fermions is what gives rise to the matter in the universe. Particles such as protons are composite particles; those made from different quark combinations are collectively referred to as “hadrons”.
