The revelation on Wednesday that scientists have likely detected the Higgs boson, commonly known as the God particle, has enormous significance for physics. Up till now, the field of physics has used what is called the standard model to understand particles in the universe and the forces at work between them. This model describes everything we see in nature. This model has worked very well, but at its core lay a problem: It did not know how to describe mass. But we all know that particles have mass. The proposed solution to this problem came in the form of the "Higgs mechanism." The standard model in physics is almost complete but there is an open question as to how particles acquire mass and why their masses are different from one another. Professor Peter Higgs and several of his colleagues years ago postulated a mechanism that would display the existence of a certain particle, the Higgs boson, which would cause other particles to acquire mass. The Higgs boson was dubbed the "God particle" by Leon Lederman because it essentially causes mass to exist. But we have not reached the end of the story. In essence, we have actually only finished Chapter 1; now we can begin working on Chapter 2. In this era of modern physics, we are looking beyond the standard model, a type of physics unknown until now. For example, now we can deal with additional dimensions or meta-symetrics. It is more likely, though, that we will reach something else. We are likely to reach things beyond the standard model that we don't even yet know how to explain. On a personal note, I am ecstatic and walking on a cloud. We have searched for this particle for 30 years. This is a huge technological achievement. Scientists in Israel played a meaningful role in this discovery. Scientists at the Technion, Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute all participated in the Atlas experiment, one of the two Swiss particle accelerator projects. Professor Shlomit Terem and I wrote, at the Technion, one of the plans used for the experiment and we also participated in the analysis of the results. The writer is a member of the physics faculty at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
