The hunt for the God particle
“One of the greatest prizes in modern physics – the confirmation or otherwise of a theoretical sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson – is back up for grabs. In 2000, scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland came, they believed, within a hair’s-breadth of spotting the Higgs before their atom-smasher had to be scrapped to make way for a more powerful machine, due to be finished in 2007.

If the Higgs is discovered, that would fill the gap in the Standard Model and comfortingly confirm our perception of what the Universe is and how it works.

But if it is proved that the Higgs does not exist, that would be a huge event. It would open the way for a whole range of alternative theories to replace the Standard Model — that, for instance, there are overlapping “parallel” Universes or higher dimensions.”