The End is Coming
Fifty years past, scientists asked the question why are we here? It wasn’t a philosophical question for it had been a logical one. Technically, there was no logical reason why humans or the universe, for that matter, ought to exist. The rationale for that was that the universe had been created with equal amounts matter and matter. This should have meant universal annihilation at the instant of birth as matter and antimatter cannot coexist. That clearly failed to happen as a result of this link existing and you're reading it. Matter was shaped that eventually became planets and life itself. So, why did this happen? Why did the universe end up with more matter than antimatter?
One Man Thought Otherwise
Dr. Peter Higgs Well, in 1965, a British-born Canadian man of science named Peter Higgs posited that there was a single particle at the start of the universe that titled that matter-antimatter balance in favor of matter. It has been referred to as the Higgs particle ever since and, since 1965, left in the dust bin of history as undiscovered because science never had the technology that could conceive of searching for it. The problem was that the energy needed to birth the particle was way beyond any of the machines of the past.
Then Came the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
That was all true until the inability to reach the appropriate level of energy to even sniff that particle became annoying. At that point, multiple countries from the US to the European Union came together to accomplish that very idea. Several years later, in the catacombs beneath the City of Light, an engineering marvel came to life. A massive instrument capable of sending tiny particles in circles at dizzying speeds approaching that of light was finally opened to the research scientists to find this elusive particle. Man was no longer the destroyer of worlds as Julius Robert Oppenheimer had observed at Los Alamos so many eons ago, but the creator of a Big Bang in miniature. What had man wrought? A tiny universe, that's what.
EUREKA! After a few unsuccessful tries, the LHC produced the requisite energy and the particle, the Higgs boson, was confirmed as found exactly where Dr. Higgs predicted it would be. Science rejoiced and Dr. Higgs was handed his Nobel Prize 52 years in the making. That is science. It can take that long to reveal itself to mere mortals like humans. We now had physical proof that there was a reason the universe did not destroy itself but rather coalesced to the point where humans could study it in such detail. Rene Decartes may have posited cogito ergo som (I think therefore I exist), but Peter Higgs probably would have phrased it in the reverse som ergo cogito because one has to be before one can think. And the Higgs boson is one heck of reason to exist in response to Hamlet's query.
Higgs Boson Particle May Spell Doom For the Universe - Yahoo! News From Yahoo! News: BOSTON — A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.