SANTA BARBARA COUNTY - The Higgs Boson particle was predicted 50 years ago to help scientists understand the creation of the universe which many think was a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
Central Coast News spoke via Skype with the UCSB Physics Professor who's been in Geneva, Switzerland about this week's big discovery.
"The Higgs particle is really special in the sense that it creates a field that permeates the entire universe", says UCSB Physics Professor Joe Incandela, "it interacts with all other particles, all of the things that have mass."
Incandela leads one of two teams of thousands of scientists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and its massive atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider that lies beneath the Swiss-French border.
The $10 billion collider creates high energy collisions of protons which have led scientists to the discovery of what they now believe is a Higgs particle.
"If that wasn't the case we'd have no atoms", Incandela says, "we would have nothing around us that we have today and that's partly why this name of "God Particle" came up, most particle physcists don't use that name."
Incandela says the plan now is for scientists to continue to study the Higgs particle and collect more data that will help them better understand it and perhaps much, much more.
"It can tell us about the stability of the universe", Incandela says, "how long the universe will last, which is pretty mind blowing I think, so its a very deep probe now into the whole of reality."
Incandela says he frequently sees and works with his fellow UCSB faculty and staff colleagues who make routine visits to the CERN and the Large Hadron Collider which they also helped design and build.
The word going around the physics world is the Higgs Boson particle find puts those involved in its discovery line for a Nobel Prize.
If UCSB scientists share in the prize, they would join five other Nobel Laureates at UCSB.
