Sometimes known as the ‘god’ particle, there’s talk that a major announcement is about to be made about the Higgs boson next week at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics). From the Dec. 6, 2011 posting by Ian Sample on the Guardian science blogs,

Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday’s seminar [Dec. 13, 2011] on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson.

I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle. [emphasis mine]

Sample provides an explanation of the Higgs boson and why it and its mechanism has such importance,

…  The Higgs mechanism describes an invisible field that, it is argued, split one force into two soon after the birth of the universe. Specifically, it divided an ancient “electroweak” force into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see at work today. The latter is seen in some radioactive decay processes, and is involved in creating sunshine. [emphasis mine]

This is an excerpt from the full explanation, which precedes answers from a number of physicists around the world to a question Sample asked about what gives mass to fundamental particles. Here are a few randomly chosen answers Sample received to his question,

Shelly Glashow, Boston University. Nobel prize in physics, 1979

“They said when the collider goes on
Soon they’d see that elusive boson
Very soon we shall hear
Whether Cern finds it this year
But it’s something I won’t bet very much on.”

Frank Wilczek, MIT. Nobel prize in physics, 2004

“The Higgs mechanism for generating masses is extremely attractive and has no real competition. Beyond that there’s little certainty. A near-minimal implementation of supersymmetry, perhaps augmented with ultra-weakly interacting particles, is the prettiest possibility. So I’d like several Higgs particles, Higgisinos, some ghostly stuff, and a pony.”
[Note: A Higgsino is a supersymmetric partner of a Higgs boson].

…

Martinus Veltman, Universities of Michigan and Utrecht. Nobel prize in physics, 1999

“You are mistaken about the Higgs search at Cern. The machine runs at half energy so far, and no one expects relevant (for the Higgs particle) results. After the shutdown [in 2013] the machine will gradually go up in energy, and if all goes well (this is non-trivial) then in about half a year the machine energy might reach design value and there might be Higgs-relevant results. So if you are thinking next week then you are mistaken. Of course, we never know what surprises nature has in store for us … It is my opinion that there is no Higgs.”

Philip Anderson, Princeton University. Nobel prize in physics, 1977

“I doubt if the opinions of one who thinks about these problems perhaps every 30 years or so will carry much weight. I’ve been busy. But the last time I thought, I realised a) that the Higgs (-A) mechanism fits the facts too beautifully not to be true, but b) it must be incomplete, because there’s no proper accounting of the vacuum energy.”
[Note: Anderson essentially described the Higgs mechanism in 1962, two years before Higgs and five other physicists published the theory.]

There are more answers in Sample’s posting.

While it’s fascinating to see how widely divergent opinions are about Higgs, I have to confess my understanding of all this is rudimentary. Perhaps the dancers and performers (my Nov. 28, 2011 posting about a dance/performance residency at CERN) will help clarify the matter for me.