The discovery of the Higgs boson -- sometimes called the "God particle" is one of the most significant in human history, and FOX 9 News spoke with author Tom Schuett to learn why and what comes next for science.
Schuett has been studying the project for years, and penned the book, "Collider."
For 50 years, scientists have been seeking the Higgs boson because they believe it will answer questions about how the universe came to be, how we all got here, and how nature works.
On July 4 at the CERN lab in Switzerland, scientists told the world they have discovered a new sub-atomic particle that looks and acts just like the Higgs boson.
"It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years," said Joe Incandela, a physicist of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Wednesday's announcement was also an impressive opening act for the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics machine, which cost $10 billion to build and began operating only two years ago. It is still running at only half-power.
The questions now are:
- What does this mean in layman's terms?
- Does this change anything in our day-to-day lives?
- What does it mean in the science world?
- What questions can now be answered that were not able to be answered before?
Many scientists say is a piece to the puzzle to help us understand the world. They compare it to the work in the 1930s of quantum mechanics, which has given the world many benefits.
