For a few brief moments in April, it looked like the quest as over. It seemed like the scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had found the elusive “God particle”.
Turns out they didn’t.
Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago’s Fermilab facility have finally released the results of a months-long effort by some of the world’s brightest minds to confirm the finding.
They found nothing.
“We do not see the signal,” says Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab. “If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.”
“At this point I’d say the chances are 50/50 for the Higgs to exist at all,” he added.
The results are a pretty significant disappointment for scientists, who’ve been searching for the mysterious particle for decades.
The Higgs boson has been dubbed the “God Particle” because it is thought to be the fundamental particle of matter…in other words, the smallest piece of substance that gives all other matter weight.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland was built in part to assist in proving that the theoretical particle exists, and in April it looked like it might have done just that.
James Gilies, a spokesman for CERN, says it’s still too soon for his group to release any findings, and still too early for anyone to have gotten their hopes up to begin with.
“Still too early to get excited, I’m afraid … I think this story will reach a conclusion at the main summer conferences this year — end of July. By then, the LHC experiments will have analyzed enough data to be able to say something,” Gilies said.
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