Physicists
Anxiously Await Data From Stargate
High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in
the history of physics. At 8 a.m. Eastern time on
Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European
Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a
progress report on the search for the Higgs boson —
infamously known as the “God particle” — whose
discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how
elementary particles get mass.
The report comes amid rumors that the two competing
armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of
trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large
Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both
finally seen hints of what might turn out be the
elusive particle when more data is gathered next year.
Alternatively, the experimentalists say that a year
from now they should have enough data to...