After 30 years in the shadow of biology, physics is in the news as never before. One of life’s big questions – why there is any “stuff” in the universe at all – may be on the verge of being solved. In addition, a tiny particle has been caught breaking Einstein’s cosmic speed limit, and, as a result, travelling backwards in time is being seriously discussed. To cap it all, according to rampant internet rumours, physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva are expected to reveal today whether or not they have evidence of the infamous “God Particle?”, or Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle, the existence of which was proposed by the British physicist Peter Higgs in the Sixties. It is thought to endow everything in the universe with mass. Although Sir Isaac Newton discovered that mass is the source of gravity, and Albert Einstein?’s famous equation E=mc² showed that mass is also a form of energy, what mass is and where it comes from remains mysterious.
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