Physicists have made a particularly interesting find; it’s a new particle called the Higgs boson.

It could go a long way in helping to explain how the universe came to be.

Bosons behave differently from the regular particles we learn about in school. They can occupy the same space as other particles and often carry force. A photon is an example of a boson. The boson is part of a model, used by Bose-Einstein statistics, called the Standard Model and it’s used to explain physics. That’s changing now.

I wouldn’t call this a scientific discovery, but rather a finding. Scientists speculated this particle might exist, and now here it is. This is good for science; it shows the research was moving in the right direction, and I hope that direction leads us to completing the picture of our reality that still has many holes.

You may hear this particle being called the “God particle,” after a book title on the subject.

“It’s an enormous celebration and everyone’s incredibly excited to have found it, but this is by no means a gigantic surprise,” said prominent theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed. Scientists have known about this particle, but couldn’t prove it existed until now.

This particle sits in the framework of our reality and gives matter its mass, making things be. The Higgs boson, while it is a particle, is also a kind of grid. The particles move around other particles in the grid. By swarming around other particles, Higgs bosons give mass to matter.

Scientists from the world community of research gathered (the group is called CERN) and built the Large Hadron Collider, a giant 17-mile tunnel located 328 feet underneath the border of France and Switzerland, connecting into a ring. Inside this ring, a high velocity smashes atoms together so they explode apart. Scientists can then view the results. The Large Hadron Collider cost $10 billion and has been sending particles smashing together for the past 18 months.

Meanwhile in America, the U.S.-based scientists outlined their final analysis based on more than 10 years of research and 500 trillion particle collisions using the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab Tevatron collider near Batavia, Illinois, whose budgetary woes shut it down last year, according to CNN. America has lost another space race, but this time the race was to the inner space.

This shouldn’t be about who got to the finish line first, but what this finding means to the conversations taking place about physics, from the lab to the classroom. Physicists are saying this could be the first ring of ‘discoveries’ as they learn more about particles they haven’t seen before.

Scientist are drafting new theories about how the framework of our reality works, and reworking old theories. Many doubt the standard model is standard, and in fact some are hoping it is not.

I’m curious to see how we view reality in the coming years. Hopefully the funds keep coming. While some people think too much money was spent on the process, I think it’s time we stepped forward and learned more about our world.

New inventions are interesting, but far more interesting is what makes us be here, able to create things.

— Staff Writer Dawn M. Kurry can be reached at 910-997-3111, ext. 15, or by email at dkurry@heartlandpublications.com.