Scientists all Set to Declare God Particle Discovery

Scientists at Cern are all set to announce that the obscure Higgs Boson 'God Particle' has been discovered. One of science's greatest mysteries will be answered on the Wednesday on the eve of international conference in which more than 800 physicists will be present in Melbourne.

Although the findings may not qualify for an official discovery but they are hoping to show similar signals to those announced last year. The discovery of this passing particle is the most significant scientific advances in a century.

The particle, first proposed in theory by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, would prove the existence of the Higgs Field, an invisible force which gives particles their mass and prevents them from rushing through the universe at the speed of light. It is one of the world's biggest scientific experiments - for which the $A9.78 billion Large Hadron Collider in Europe was planned and built.

Melbourne University's Professor Geoffrey Taylor, who co-ordinates Australia's participation in the collider's ATLAS detector, one of four detectors located around the collider's 27-kilometre ring said, "'It's esoteric. But we're trying to understand the processes which were occurring at the very beginnings of the universe. It's really exciting, compelling stuff."

The Higgs boson is considered as the key to understand the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass. The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons - sub-atomic particles - together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

If the theory proposed by the physicists, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying. This decay would leave behind a 'footprint' that would show up as a bump in their graphs.

However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel - there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.