Scientists Look to Quell 'God Particle' Excitement

It turns out that a recently leaked memo speculating that scientists are getting closer to proving the existence of the so-called Higgs boson “God particle” wasn’t a hoax after all.

But officials at the multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator (known as the Large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland where the work is being done don’t want anyone breaking out their best pocket protectors to celebrate just yet.

James Gillies, an official spokesman for the European lab, known as CERN, told the Telegraph this week that while the internal memo making its rounds on the Web is genuine, it’s only one of thousands that are being churned out by scientists and that nothing has been confirmed.

“It is far too early to say if there is anything to it or not,” he told the paper. ”This is an internal communication that highlights something interesting, but it has to go through several stages of assessment by the scientific team before it will be released as an official result by the collaborative team.”

And then, just in case anyone was getting excited about science for the first time since Mr. Wizard went off the air, Gillies added: “The majority of these things turn out to be nothing at all.”

As the paper explains: The still-elusive Higgs boson is a theoretical particle believed to give everything in the universe mass. It is a key part of the standard model used in physics to describe how particle and atoms are made up.

The leaked memo, written by four scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider, reported that one of the particle detectors had caught a particle that could potentially be a Higgs boson.

The internal memo was posted on the blog of Columbia University’s Peter Woit, and quickly made the rounds on the Internet, thanks in part to a link on the Drudge Report to an early news story on the item.