God particle to be found soon?

British physicist Peter Higgs believes a so-called "God particle" will be found soon when a vast particle collider at the CERN center begins operating fully early next year. Higgs theory offers an explanation why mass disappears as matter is broken down to its smallest parts - molecules, atoms and quarks. The physicists postulated that matter was weightless at the exact moment of the Big Bang and then much of it promptly gained mass due to a field which stuck to particles as they passed through it and made them heavy.

British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday 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.

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 likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told journalists.

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 Organization 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.

More details at Reuters.