Hey, everybody, did you hear the big news? They found the Higgs boson! Now, unless you've been living under a rock, are an idiot (or anything besides a physicist), the Higgs boson is a theorized particle that's believed to endow stuff with mass. For this it's earned the nickname "God particle." And the brainiacs at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva have finally caught the elusive bastard! After 40 years of searching, the Higgs boson has been discovered!Oh wait. No it hasn’t. Well, at least not yet. So please, for the love of theorized God particles, please refrain for the time being from shitting bricks and/or popping the bubbly.Yes, reports coming out of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that scientists who’ve been working tirelessly to detect traces of the elusive particle are set to make some sort of announcement this Wednesday about how they’ve got their hands on enough evidence to say with a certain level of confidence that the Higgs boson “almost certainly does exist” are tantalizing. Really, really tantalizing. This would be huge. We absolutely should be excited and waiting with bated breath to see just what it is they’ve got to say. I mean, I’m no particle physicist, but four decades seems long enough to (think about how to) look for anything, not least what theorists tell us is the mechanism responsible for endowing stuff with mass.The thought of maybe getting a first, rough glimpse of that very thing should have you and I and the rest of humanity frothing at the mouth, head spun. I think I want it to be true. It’d be about damn time. And if indeed Wednesday’s announcement confirms today’s more-than-rumors that currently have the indoor-kid corners of the Internet all wet and geeking…well, shit. I’m just gonna have to run outside and give the very first lady I cross a big fat kiss because hey, people who collide proton beams in deep underground tunnels and generally think about stuff 99 percent of us will never fully comprehend are now that much closer to cracking one of the – if not the – most fundamental riddles of the universe! Now we can finally build that skyscraper with a laser on top!Oh wow. Oh wow.But hey. Let’s all take a slow, deep breath. There has been no formal announcement. No results released to the public. No “discovery.”Read the rest at Motherboard.VICE.com.
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