British physicist Peter Higgs says it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible - as he first argued 40 years ago.
Professor Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson", which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.
The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector.
Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?
Doomsday fears spark lawsuit
The builders of the collider are being sued in US federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
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Peter Higgs told journalists in Geneva he doesn't like the term "God particle" because it might offend believers -- even though he is not one himself. More on the Reuters religion blog FaithWorld at http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/09/is-god-particle-the-right-term-for-massive-mystery-in-physics/
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