The discovery of what is called the Higgs boson particle took the world by a storm. Yet most of us do not really know what it means and it is not just lay people who do not know or not sure but also engineers, physicist and other scientist do not. I was in Cambridge University last summer and the news about the newly discovered particle filled the newspapers and TV. I asked some physicist about what it means and no one was able to give me a simple clear answer. Many people learned about the Higgs boson but very few, almost a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are capable of telling anyone what it really means rather than its history or association. However, the grand applaud by which the discovery was received attests to its importance; something that will probably become clear in the future just like with Nano-technology. There was a long search for the particle that culminated in the February 25, 2012 discovery. To come up with this discovery, in 2008, the European Organization for Nuclear Research built the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator to enable the highest-energy man-made particle collisions. It is a 27 km long and 175 meters deep tunnel built near Geneva under the French-Swiss border in order to test major theories of particle and high-energy physics, and to enhance human understanding of the physical natural laws. It aimed particularly at testing the existence of a mysterious particle that explains a missing element in our understanding of our universe. The buzz came upon believing the particle was found and it was eventually named after the scientist, Peter Higgs, who led a huge group in search for it — the Higgs boson. Like most scientific experiments, the project had its ups and downs, its moment of success and moments of failure, but like one scientist said one can also learn from failure that a certain thing or way does not work. That is what the people in this project did because they kept at it to obtain answers to their questions. They kept trying until in March 2010, the first collision of very high-speed beams occurred. After this the project began it. Yes, it took almost two years to actually do what it was designed to do. The huge unusual lab will be closed for upgrading until 2014 when it will be opened again but with a much stronger beam collision level to test. The project attests to the impact of collaboration because it was built with the efforts of thousands of scientists and engineers of around one hundred countries and hundreds of universities and labs from all around the world. However, we might just discover that we only see one side of the elephant and mistake it to be the whole one as humans did before so often.
