The discovery of a new sub-atomic particle -- the so-called Higgs boson -- may help scientists discover how the hidden structure of all matter in the universe works, a Vatican astronomer said.
"It indicates that reality is deeper and more rich and strange than our everyday life," U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno told Catholic News Service.
When people go about their everyday business working or relaxing, they don't think about the tiniest building blocks of physical matter, but "without these underlying little things, we wouldn't be here," he said.
Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, announced July 4 that they were 99.999 percent certain they found evidence of a new particle that might be key to the structure of the universe and to understanding nature.
British physicist Peter Higgs first hypothesized the existence of the particle in the 1960s as the final missing element in a framework called the Standard Model, which explains how sub-atomic particles and forces interact.
Over the decades, with the help of increasingly powerful and sophisticated high-energy particle accelerators, scientists have been searching for what atoms are made up of, what the smaller components of atoms are made up of, what the nature of those smaller components is, and so on, Brother Consolmagno said.
Full Story: New particle may unlock new discoveries, says Vatican astronomer
Source:Catholic News Service