This week may mark the beginning of a huge leap forward in our understanding of the physical world. On Tuesday, the European particle physics laboratory Cern, near Geneva, holds a special seminar to discuss the latest results from its proton-smashing experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – which will then be announced to the world.
The word is that they have found evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the material manifestation of the Higgs field that is theorised to pervade the entire universe and give mass to fundamental particles. Without it, atoms, stars and planets would never have coalesced because their subatomic constituents – free from the shackles of gravity – would be zipping around at the speed of light.
There are two research teams working on the LHC's main detectors, Atlas and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). Both teams will present their results on Tuesday.
Guardian science correspondents Ian Sample and Alok Jha quizzed Prof Jon Butterworth, who leads the UK Atlas team and is head of the physics department at University College London. You may already know Jon from his Guardian blog Life & Physics.
Before heading back to Cern to prepare his team's presentation, Jon discussed in depth the fundamental physics being probed by the world's largest machine and how scientists do their work at the frontiers of our understanding of matter.
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