CMS Collaboration / CERN

This proton-proton collision, recorded with the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid last year, shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons. One of the Z particles subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers), and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known Standard Model background processes

The subatomic particle discovered last year at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is looking more and more like the fabled Higgs boson, the one fundamental piece that's been missing from the theory that governs particle physics. But at a widely anticipated conference in Italy, physicists said they can't yet confirm 100 percent that this is the particle they're looking for.

Ever since the "Higgs-like particle" was detected, researchers at the LHC have been trying to determine whether this is the one true Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it's just one of several subatomic particles that play a role in imparting mass to other particles. There's even a chance that this particular particle something completely different, possibly linked to the way gravity works, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border.

CERN is the international organization in charge of operating the world's biggest and costliest particle accelerator.

The key to confirming the particle's status is to determine a property known as spin, CERN says. If the new particle is spin-zero, then it's a Higgs boson. If it's spin-two, it's something else. The latest results, presented at the annual Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, can't yet rule out a spin-two particle, CERN said.

"Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement on Wednesday. "Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."

Physicists will continue to analyze the data collected at the LHC over the past couple of years, and there's a good chance they'll come up with the confirmation in the months ahead — even though the collider was shut down last month for an upgrade that's expected to require two years of work. That's not guaranteed, however. Raymond Volkas, a physicist from Australia's University of Melbourne, told New Scientist that Higgs-watchers might have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC will never fully confirm the mystery particle to be the Standard Model Higgs.

Last year, scientists were intrigued by an extra "peak" in the data from ATLAS, one of the LHC's main detectors. Some wondered whether that hinted at the existence of two Higgs bosons instead of just one. But now that more readings have been added to the analysis, the anomalous peak is fading.

"When we first saw this excess a year ago, we were excited that it may be real physics and we hoped that by this time we would have a truly significant effect," the ViXra Log's Philip Gibbs writes. "This has not happened."

Gibbs said that yet-to-be-released findings are said to throw even more cold water on the two-boson hypothesis. "This means that expectations of significant BSM [beyond Standard Model] effects from run 1 are now lower," he wrote.

Update for 4 p.m. ET: The consensus appears to be that the results presented at the Moriond conference firm up the Standard Model's view of the subatomic world — which is a bit of a disappointment for those hoping to see clear signs of new physics. "It may well be a 'vanilla Higgs,' though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles," Robert Garisto, editor of the Physical Review Letters, joked in a Twitter update.

"Vanilla" was also the word used by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in his Twitter assessment, although Harvard's Lisa Randall replied that there was still a chance of getting "vanilla swirl." On his "Not Even Wrong" blog, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit says it's looking like a "garden-variety [Standard Model] Higgs, which is discouraging for hopes of hints about how to get beyond the Standard Model."

The headline on Wired's report pretty much sums up the mood: "This Just In: Higgs Boson Still Boring."

More about the Higgs boson:

• Physicists to share latest word about Higgs quest
• Higgs-like particle may foretell end of universe
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Corbis

An artist's conception visualizes the big bang at the universe's beginning — or could it be the end?

BOSTON — If the "Higgs-like particle" discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It'll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.

That's one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year. Current theory holds that the Higgs boson plays a role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles. Confirming the discovery of the Higgs would fill in the last blank spot in that theory, known as the Standard Model.

Physicists discussed the state of the Higgs quest in Boston on Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

So far, the particle that was found at the LHC fits all the requirements for the Higgs boson, but scientists aren't quite ready to confirm that the particle is really, truly the Higgs boson. It could be, say, just the first of multiple particles involved in the process. "The door is still very much open that there's [another] particle that has a role to play, or even more than that," said Christopher Hill, a physicist at Ohio State University who is also deputy physics coordinator for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.

The LHC has just started a two-year shutdown for equipment upgrades — and Howard Gordon, deputy chair of the physics program at Brookhaven National Laboratory, said "it's going to take another few years" after the collider is restarted to confirm definitively that the newfound particle is the Higgs boson.

In the meantime, physicists have tightened their estimates of the particle's mass: Hill said the current estimate from the Compact Muon Solenoid is 125.8 billion electron volts, or 125.8 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV. The figure from the LHC's other Higgs-boson detector, known as ATLAS, is 125.2 GeV, plus or minus 0.7 GeV.

Those figures can be factored into equations that point to the long-term fate of the universe, said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.

So what's the outlook?

"If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Lykken said. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped out."

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away."

Lykken put it slightly differently: "The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us."

That alternate universe would be "much more boring," Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: "Why do we live in a universe that's just on the edge of stability?" He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets ... and life.

Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. "That's something new, which we didn't know before, and which leads some of us to that there's something else coming," Hill said.

When Hill referred to "something else," he was talking about new discoveries in physics — not the end of the world. Lykken emphasized that it would be at least tens of billions of years before vacuum instability took hold.

"To get the exact number, we need more funding," he joked.

More about the fate of the universe:

• A bleak and lonely outlook for the universe
• Will time end in 3.7 billion years? Maybe, or maybe not
• Flash interactive: Beyond the big bang

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

As 2012 draws to a close, physicists are celebrating — and being celebrated for — the end of a four-decade scientific quest to find a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. The discovery, made at the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider and reported in July, won honors this week as Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year as well as a piece of the spotlight in Time magazine's Person of the Year package.

But the story of what some have nicknamed "the God particle" isn't over yet. (Physicists hate that nickname, by the way.)

"This particle has the potential to be a portal to a new landscape of physical phenomena that is still hidden from us," the scientific team behind the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector writes in a Science paper that lays out the details behind the discovery.

That sentiment comes through as well in another paper from the LHC's ATLAS collaboration, which found results consistent with those from the CMS detector. The ATLAS scientists say finding the particle appears to provide the "last missing piece" in the Standard Model, the scientific theory that explains the subatomic realm — but also sets the stage for further studies "to explore the physics that must lie beyond" the Standard Model.

Both teams said they detected a particle that matched the quarry they sought, with a mass in the range of 125 billion electron volts. But they haven't yet quite confirmed that its characteristics fully conform with the theoretical particle that was proposed in the 1960s to fill in the Standard Model's remaining gaps.

CERN / ATLAS Experiment

This schematic shows the pattern of subatomic particle tracks associated with a candidate event for the detection of the Higgs boson.

That particle would help explain why some fundamental particles, such as the W and Z bosons, possess mass — while others, such as photons, don't. Physicists can see that such a mechanism must exist; otherwise, the cosmos just wouldn't work. The problem is figuring out how the mechanism is structured. The Higgs boson, and its associated Higgs field, fills the bill.

There's still some question whether the new particle reported this year is the Higgs boson, as described in the traditional Standard Model, or part of a more complex Higgs mechanism that may include other particles. Last week, there was a brief kerfuffle over whether the data from ATLAS hinted at two Higgs particles — but as of now, the leading view is that those hints are just statistical fluctuations that will eventually disappear. The definitive word is expected to come at a conference in March.

By that time, the LHC will be shut down for a major upgrade. The particle collider, housed in a 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, has been running at energies of up to 8 trillion electron volts — but the upgrade will allow it to operate at 13 to 14 TeV starting in 2015. That's when the really way-out discoveries, relating to mysteries such as supersymmetry or the nature of dark matter, could come to light.

Why should we care about the Higgs boson? It may not bring us a better iPhone next year — but a better understanding of fundamental physics typically leads to better applications down the line. Just ask the inventors of medical scanners, microwave ovens or laser devices. For more on the practical implications of research at the LHC, check out our interactive interview with physicist Michio Kaku.

The same disclaimer goes for Science's runner-up breakthroughs of the year. You may not see how some of these discoveries can relate to everyday life — but someday, you or your children will:

Unraveling the Denisovan genome: In late 2010, anthropologists used genetic tools to discover a new type of human ancestor that lived in Siberia tens of thousands of years ago, dubbed the Denisovans. This year, they used a new technique to compare the Denisovan genome with those of modern-day populations — and confirmed that some parts of the Denisovan genetic heritage were passed on. That's right, kids: Our ancestors did it with Denisovans. The new technique is expected to yield a high-quality version of the Neanderthal genome in 2013.

Making eggs from stem cells: Japanese researchers coaxed mouse stem cells into becoming viable eggs that produce healthy offspring. There are a few caveats: The eggs still have to be hosted by an actual mouse during one stage of their maturation, and the technique doesn't yet work with human cells. But the project represents another significant step in the fight against infertility.

Curiosity's landing system: Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars in August was that a system designed to lower the rover from a rocket-powered, hovering platform actually worked. NASA engineers acknowledged that the idea seemed crazy but insisted it was the "least crazy" way to get the 1-ton payload safely to the surface. The "sky crane" concept worked so well that NASA plans to do it again in 2020. For more about the Curiosity mission, check out our "Year in Space" roundup.

X-ray laser reveals protein structure: Scientists used intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser to collect data on the 3-D structure of proteins — and single-shot images of an intact virus. "The grand goal is to push X-ray diffraction to its ultimate limit and use an X-ray laser to decipher a protein structure by zapping individual molecules," Science's editors write.

Precision engineering of genomes: If you haven't heard about TALENs and CRISPR yet, you will — at least if genetic engineering is your thing. These are new tools for "editing" the genomes of creatures ranging from zebrafish to rats and crickets. Even human cells are being tweaked for research purposes. "Some researchers now think TALENs [transcription activator-like effector nucleases] will become standard procedure for all molecular biology labs," the editors say.

Majorana fermions detected, sort of: Seventy-five years ago, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana theorized that a weird type of subatomic particle existed that could act as its own antiparticle. This year, Dutch physicists reported tentative signs that the particles have at last been detected. If their existence is confirmed, Majorana fermions would have properties that make them perfectly suited for quantum computing.

ENCODE zooms in on human genome: After a decade of research, a $288 million project to trace all the threads that make up the human genome issued a blizzard of scientific papers. The studies suggested that only a small percentage of our DNA is wrapped up in our genes. At the time, much was made of the fact that what was once called "junk DNA" plays an important role in our genetic makeup. But we knew that already, right? The important thing is that Project ENCODE ("Encyclopedia of DNA Elements") has made a grand start toward reading, and understanding, our book of life.

Better brain-machine interfaces: Is the "Star Trek" nightmare vision of the Borg coming to pass? Not yet: We are not being assimilated into machinery. But in the future, it should become easier for us to assimilate machinery when the need arises. Researchers are perfecting techniques for controlling artificial limbs, computers or other devices with our thoughts alone. Someday even physicist Stephen Hawking might benefit from mind-reading systems.  

A new door in neutrino physics: Researchers caught a rare type of exotic particle known as an electron antineutrino in the act of disappearing, at an experimental facility in China — and that vanishing trick provided yet another long-sought puzzle piece in subatomic physics. The researchers said they measured the last parameter describing how different types of neutrinos morph into each other. For what it's worth, that parameter, the mixing angle known as theta13, equals 8.8 degrees, plus or minus 0.8 degrees. The fact that the value isn't zero could help explain why there's so much matter and so little antimatter in our universe.

Frontiers for 2013: In addition to 2012's breakthroughs, Science's editors highlighted six scientific areas to watch in 2013: single-cell DNA sequencing, the Planck probe's study of the cosmic microwave background, the Human Connectome Project, ultra-deep ice drilling at Antarctica's Lake Vostok, cancer immunotherapy research and basic plant research.

More about the Higgs quest:

• How will Nobel Prizes handle Higgs hassle?
• Comics go beyond the Higgs boson
• Gallery: Your guide to the particle zoo
• Cosmic Log archive on Higgs boson
• Special report on the Big Bang Machine

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CMS Collaboration / CERN

The Large Hadron Collider's CMS Collaboration gets its collective picture taken in front of a full-scale picture of the CMS detector at Europe's CERN particle physics lab. More than 3,000 scientists, engineers and students are involved in the CMS Collaboration, and just about that many more are involved in the collaboration for the LHC's other primary detector, ATLAS.

The Higgs boson received nary a mention at this year's Nobel Prize proceedings — and although the Higgs hunt has been the biggest news in physics over the past year, there are good reasons for the silence. Next year, however, the Nobel committee could have a huge Higgs hassle on its hands. And maybe that's a good thing.

Some observers think the conundrum surrounding a potential physics prize for the Higgs boson could lead the Nobel committee to make some long-overdue changes. And that, in turn, could change the public perception of how science is done.

First, here's the main reason why this year's discovery of a "Higgs-like particle" wasn't Nobel-worthy this year, even though it validated a 40-year quest: The key breakthrough came to light in July, when the teams behind the Large Hadron Collider's two main experiments — ATLAS and CMS — declared that they had enough data to merit an official discovery of a new subatomic particle. That's well past the traditional deadline for nominations, and although deadlines can be bent, the findings still need to be firmed up.

MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who won a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on the strong nuclear force, said as much in an interview with LiveScience's Clara Moskowitz: "There are ways to stretch the rules, but evidently the relevant decision-makers felt that there was not sufficient reason to do so in this case."

Wilczek added that a Nobel Prize recognizing the theoretical underpinnings behind the Higgs boson was "the odds-on favorite for next year."

Too soon?
Usually, the committee in charge of awarding the physics prize waits until a breakthrough becomes so much a part of the scientific mainstream that there's no doubt about its truth and its value. That's the way it was this year, when French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland were honored for work in quantum optics that they pioneered 20 years ago.

When it comes to the Higgs, however, the clock is ticking: British physicist Peter Higgs —who lent his name to the theory, the field and the particle that would explain the origins of particle mass — is 83 years old. Other contributors to the theory are of a similar age. The theory itself was developed in the 1960s, and the real marvel is that Higgs and his colleagues were proven so right, so long after they came up with the idea.

But tradition dictates that the prize can be shared by no more than three individuals, who all have to be alive (although that rule was bent last year). Besides Peter Higgs, who should be in on the glory? Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who has just finished a book about the Higgs quest titled "The Particle at the End of the Universe," says Belgian physicist Francois Englert is the best candidate for the second spot. Several others have valid claims on the third spot, however. And then, how about recognizing the thousands of physicists who worked on the LHC collaborations?

This is the sort of quandary that has tied physicists in knots for years. Wilczek himself has said he's using the "no more than three" rule as a key plot device in a murder mystery he's writing, tentatively titled "The Attraction of Darkness." It's about a team of four physicists who discover the true nature of dark matter, and find themselves up for a Nobel Prize. "One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not," he told The New York Times.

Do the right thing
The way Carroll sees it, the Higgs hassle provides a perfect opportunity for the Nobel committee members to change their tradition — and ruin the premise of Wilczek's novel in the process.

"They can do the right thing, and stop insisting that only three people can win it," Carroll told me. "Maybe that's something they can talk about over the next 365 days."

Carroll isn't alone on this: This week, Scientific American's editors urged the Nobel Foundation to change its ways, either by merely throwing out the "no more than three" rule, or by allowing the prize to be awarded to groups as well as individuals. Etienne Klein, a physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission, was quoted as saying the Nobel committee should "take a gamble" and award a Nobel to Higgs, Englert and Europe's CERN particle physics center, which manages the LHC. Columbia University's Peter Woit, the blogging mathematician behind "Not Even Wrong," favored going with CERN plus the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.

Some might think recognizing groups rather than individuals would represent a dilution of Nobel prestige — but it can easily be argued that the change would bring the scientific prizes in line with the practice for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is routinely awarded to organizations ranging from the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007).

The change could also shift the popular perception of the scientific process — away from the image of a scientist slaving away alone in a basement lab, and toward a more complex picture of scores, hundreds or thousands of researchers working together, connected via global networks. In short, the picture that actually reflects how science is usually done nowadays.

Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, what's the best way to convince the Nobel committee to make a noble change? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Correction for 4:40 p.m. ET Oct. 11: I originally wrote that Belgian physicist Francois Englert was French. That error has been corrected. Pardonnez-moi s'il vous plaît!

More about the Nobel and the Higgs:

• Nobel physics prize highlights quantum optics
• Chemists win Nobel for study of protein receptors
• Medicine prize recognizes stem cell breakthroughs
• The art and science of guessing a Nobel Prize
• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

If only there were a graphic novel that could guide you around the frontiers of physics! We mused over that possibility on "Virtually Speaking Science" just a couple of nights ago, during a discussion of what lies beyond the Higgs boson — totally unaware that PHD Comics' Jorge Cham had just put out a video graphic novel addressing that very topic.

Cham's latest animation draws upon the expertise of Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng, physicists at the University of California at Irvine, to explain how the discovery of a new "Higgs-like" particle at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is only the first of many blockbuster discoveries expected from the $10 billion facility over the next few decades.

One of the most way-out possibilities is that the LHC could pick up the signs of extra spatial dimensions beyond the three we know and love. Like the Higgs boson, which is thought to play a role in endowing other particles with mass, the existence of extra dimensions is suggested by some of the questions still outstanding in physics — for example, why is gravity so much weaker than the other fundamental forces of nature? But the evidence to back up that suggestion is devilishly difficult to come up with.

Cham literally sketches the outlines of the mystery in his animation, and graphically shows why the LHC is way bigger than the Higgs.

For more about the frontiers that lie beyond the Higgs, check out my Q&A with Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, listen to our hourlong conversation during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," and drop into the Second Life virtual world at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT/SLT) Saturday to hear about "The Quest for the Higgs Particle" from Rutgers' Matt Strassler, the physicist behind the widely respected "Of Particular Significance" blog.

More about the Higgs boson:

• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Higgs explained in (more than) a minute
• The lighter side of the Higgs quest
• The Higgs boson made simple
• How the Higgs gives things mass
• Gallery: Your guide to the particle zoo
• Cosmic Log archive on the Higgs quest

Hat tip to Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance. By the way, you can also download the "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast from iTunes.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN file

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking visits the Large Hadron Collider's underground tunnel in 2006. He bet against the discovery of the Higgs boson but is now willing to pay up.

When it comes to betting on cosmic outcomes like the discovery of the Higgs boson, British physicist Stephen Hawking is a three-time loser. But there's a good reason for that.

Hawking's latest loss was to Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan who worked out some of the ways that the Higgs boson could be detected in a particle-smasher like the Large Hadron Collider. About 10 years ago, Kane was discussing some of the issues while he and Hawking were together at a physics conference.

"Stephen interrupted, and said he would like to bet me that there was no Higgs boson," Kane recalled today. It took a while to work out the conditions of the $100 bet, and at one point things looked so dim for the search that Kane sent Hawking a check, according to The Detroit News.

But this week, when researchers at the LHC announced that a subatomic particle matching the Higgs boson's general description had been discovered, it was Hawking's turn to concede the bet. "It seems I have just lost $100," he told the BBC's Pallab Ghosh.

Waiting for the check
Kane told me he's heard from several third parties that Hawking is acknowledging his loss, but said Hawking himself "hasn't sent me anything yet." He figures that Hawking will eventually make good on the gambling debt.

"The important thing is the discovery of the Higgs," Kane said. "But it's fun to win a bet from Stephen, and I'm guessing he doesn't mind losing a little money."

This isn't the first time Hawking has lost a small-stakes, high-profile bet on a scientific proposition.

Back in 1975, he bet Caltech physicist Kip Thorne that there was no black hole at the center of the X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1. By 1998, he conceded that the black hole was there, and got Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse magazine as a payoff.

In 1997, Thorne and Hawking bet Caltech's John Preskill that information is completely lost when something falls into a black hole. But in 2004, Hawking changed his mind and said that information could conceivably leak out of a black hole. Hawking paid up by sending Preskill the repository of information he requested: a baseball encyclopedia. At last report, Thorne had not yet conceded.

There's another wager still pending: Hawking is betting that primordial gravitational waves will be detected, resulting in the confirmation of inflationary big-bang theory. The Perimeter Institute's Neil Turok, a proponent of the cyclic model of cosmic origins, is betting against him.

"If these gravitational waves are seen, they will instantly disprove our model," Turok told Cambridge professor Alan Macfarlane. The terms of the bet, however, are still under negotiation.

0-for-3 record
So, as far as we know, Hawking is 0-for-3, with one bet still up in the air. That led the BBC's Ghosh to joke today in a Twitter update that "research effort could be saved if we knew what other bets Prof. Hawking has placed and assume he'll lose." The only bet that I'm sure Hawking has won is the poker hand he played on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." And that was written into the script.

Is Hawking really that bad at anticipating future developments in physics? Not really. The guy just bets with his heart, not with his head.

In the case of Cygnus X-1, for instance, he was actually glad to lose the wager. "This was a form of insurance policy for me," he explained in "A Brief History of Time," his bestselling book. "I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet."

The bet about the fate of information in black holes was a true cosmic conundrum, and Hawking decided to go along with the more conservative of the two alternatives, even if it meant buying an encyclopedia for Preskill. If Hawking stuck to his guns, he would have to maintain that the information in black holes disappeared into other universes.

"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said in 2004. "If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."

Hoping for the unexpected
As for the Higgs boson, Hawking was hoping that there'd be a less orthodox and more elegant mechanism to explain how it is that some particles have mass while others don't. Finding the Standard Model Higgs boson, and nothing else, would be a disappointing outcome — as fellow physicist Stephen Wolfram pointed out in a blog posting today. So once again, Hawking was betting with his heart.

"If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, that will be strong evidence for the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains all our experiments so far," Hawking said. "This is an important result, and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize. But it is a pity, in a way, because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect."

If it turns out that the particle revealed this week is a non-Standard Model Higgs boson, Hawking might still be able to hang onto his $100, and the cosmos will get that much more mysterious. But in any case, Kane is moving on to the next big thing: supersymmetry, the idea that every one of the subatomic particles we've detected to date has a weird twin we haven't yet been able to see. Such a concept could explain the nature of dark matter, which accounts for far more of the universe than the ordinary matter we see around us.

As strange as it sounds, Kane thinks it's possible to find evidence of supersymmetry — and he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.

"I'd love to have bets on supersymmetry," he told me, "but no one will take them."

Update for 2:30 p.m. ET July 6: Kane told me that it was premature to say what he'd spend the $100 on, but in a Reuters report, he said that "all funds go toward research." He also said that winning the bet was a very nice frosting on the cake" for this week's boson discovery.

Reuters also quotes Scottish theorist Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who came up with the idea behind the field and the particle that now bears his name, as saying that he was tipped off about the discovery the night before Wednesday's announcement, during a champagne dinner with CERN researchers. On the flight home from the event,  fellow physicist Alan Walker offered Higgs a glass of Prosecco sparkling wine — but Walker told Reuters that Higgs said, "I'd rather have a beer." 

More on the Higgs hoopla:

• The lighter side of the Higgs boson
• Higgs boson explained in (more than) a minute
• Milestone in Higgs quest: Scientists find new particle
• The Higgs boson made simple
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Martin Thibault

Boson de Higgs beer is a wheat beer that combines sour, smoky and spicy flavors ... and it's made with real bosons. The beer was reviewed for Les Coureurs des Boires, a blog authored by Martin Thibault and David Levesque Gendron.

The Higgs-like boson that was unveiled this week at Europe's CERN physics lab is one of the heaviest subatomic particles ever detected, but it also has a lighter side. Like light beer, for example.

The Hopfenstark brewery in Montreal has been serving up Boson de Higgs beer for more than a year, and brewer/owner Fred Cormier told me today that there are 2,500 bottles waiting to be shipped to celebrate this week's discovery. About half of that batch will be earmarked for export to the United States.

The brew has gotten positive reviews from beer aficionados in Quebec.

"It's far from a gimmick with a label," Martin Thibault, who reviewed the beer for a blog called Les Coureurs des Boires, told me today in an email. "It's a delicious brew in which beechwood-smoked malts uplift citrusy, lactic subtleties. Fierce bubbling, cracking wheat and leveled banana esters also enhance the impression of refreshment. It's as complex as it is highly drinkable; a rare treat in the New World where intense flavors are often preferred by brewers and drinkers alike."

Hopfenstark's Cormier said Boson de Higgs is a fusion of three different brewing styles: Berliner Weisse wheat beer ("a bit sour"), the German rauchbier method (which imparts "a smoky flavor") and the Belgian saison style ("tart and spicy.")

Why Boson de Higgs? Just as the Higgs boson is a particle that gives mass to other particles, "this beer gives weight to other beers ... since the Boson de Higgs has been created, many breweries try to do something similar," Cormier said.

OK ...

If a sour, smoky, spicy wheat beer isn't to your taste, there's Flying Monkeys Super Collider Double IPA, a brew from Ontario. (What is it about Canadian beermakers and particle physics?) And if wine is more your thing, you could celebrate the findings from the Compact Muon Solenoid with Hedges' C.M.S. red, or the ATLAS team's contribution with an Atlas vintage from Australia. But if you're a physicist at CERN, the most apt beverage is, of course, champagne.

A few sips of champagne at the Large Hadron Collider's control center would put anyone in the mood for a few Higgs boson jokes. BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin has put together a selection of 'em, and you can find more by checking the Twitter hashtag #HiggsJokes. One joke in particular is already a classic, and it comes straight from the mirthful mind of Brian Malow, the Science Comedian:

To hear the joke as it was meant to be told, check out the archived video of Malow's routine from Wonderfest 2009. The Higgs boson wisecrack comes at the 16:30 point in the video, but if you're like me, you'll want to watch the whole thing — and catch Malow's act in person the next time he's in town.

The Symmetry Breaking blog is doing a photo-bombing contest in which users mash up images to put the elusive Higgs boson in its place. Entries can be posted to Facebook or tweeted for Twitter attention. One of my favorites is Melissa Van De Werfhorst's "Most Interesting Particle in the World," which parodies a certain beer brand's advertising campaign:

Melissa Van De Werfhorst

This video by "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart pays tribute to the Higgs-like particle in a sonnet: 

And this one suggests just how much of an impression the Higgs quest has made on the streets of Brooklyn:

Meanwhile, Quantum Diaries' John Huth pulled off the biggest coup of all: Getting Mark Twain out of the fires of Purgatory to witness the coming of the "God particle."

"By some chance miracle, my captor-angels granted me this dispensation and directed me to a physicist as a guide," Twain writes. "He was an experimental physicist, who I am told is of the lowly caste, constantly soiling his britches in the muck of reality. Why I was not directed to a theorist, who I was told wore the wings of the eternal, I know not."

It's just a good thing Twain didn't end up with a journalist as his guide.

More of the serious and the silly:

• Higgs boson explained in (more than) a minute
• Milestone in Higgs quest: Scientists find new particle
• The Higgs boson made simple
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• L.A. Times: So the Higgs boson walks into a ...
• The Guardian: Best Higgs jokes on Twitter
• Borowitz Report: Interview with the Higgs boson
• AFP: Boson discovery spawns bad-joke day
• Dilbert discovers the Higgs boson
• Les Horribles Cernettes sing 'Hey, Mr. Higgs'

Tip o' the Log to Jeff Foust for pointing me toward Boson de Higgs beer.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists say they've discovered a type of particle that's never been seen before — a particle that mostly matches the description of the fabled Higgs boson.

"This is a very, very preliminary result, but we think it's very strong," said Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Hundreds thronged to an auditorium at the CERN particle-physics center near Geneva to hear the latest from the LHC, and thousands more watched the proceedings on computers and big screens around the world. The timing of today's briefings was most convenient for Europeans as well as researchers attending the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Australia, but video-viewing parties were organized as well in the middle of the night for scientists and science fans in the United States.

"As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer told the audience in the auditorium. "Do you agree?"

His question sparked wild applause.

Expectations matched
The advance buzz suggested that researchers would report observations of a previously unknown particle that fit the characteristics of the Higgs boson. Last December, the teams behind the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments reported seeing "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs, and since then, the experiments have doubled the amount of data collected from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions at higher energies.

The results presented by Incandela were in line with expectations. "We have observed a new boson," he reported. Incandela set the mass level of the new particle at 125.3 billion electron volts, or 125.3 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV.

Results from the ATLAS experiment also pointed to "clear signs of a new particle" in the range of 126.5 GeV, spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti said in a statement. The uncertainty factors were wide enough for one particle to produce both of those reported values. CMS and ATLAS serve as backups for each other, and the fact that the same phenomenon was observed at both detectors added to the solidity of the claims.

Physicists said more data would have to be collected to confirm that the particle was truly the Higgs.

"To say you've discovered the Higgs ... it's a complicated story," CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis said in a video prepared in advance of today's briefings. "It's one thing to see evidence of a new particle, but you have to check whether it has the right properties. And to check whether it has the right properties will actually take quite a bit of extra work."

After today's announcement, Heuer alluded to the job ahead. "We have to find out which kind of Higgs boson this is. ... We have discovered a boson, and now we have to determine what kind of boson it is," he told reporters. Later, he said "we can call it a Higgs boson, but we cannot call it the Higgs boson."

Getting the full picture would take time. "Ask me in three, four years," after the LHC reaches full power, Heuer said.

Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, who is a member of the CMS research team, agreed that a little caution was in order. "It is definitely a boson, and it looks and smells like the Higgs. But until we do all the senses ... we won't know for sure," he told me.

ATLAS Collaboration

A computer graphic shows a candidate Higgs boson decay in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector, resulting in four muons. The event was recorded on June 10.

$10 billion effort
Identifying and studying the Higgs boson is the main objective of the $10 billion LHC project. It was the only fundamental subatomic particle predicted by the current theory on the subatomic structure of the cosmos, known as the Standard Model, which had yet to be found. It was hypothesized back in the 1960s, by British physicist Peter Higgs and others, as part of a mechanism to explain why some subatomic particles have mass while others don't.

"If that [Higgs boson] would not exist, then you would not exist," Heuer said.

Heuer called the discovery "the last missing cornerstone" of the Standard Model, but other physicists said there was still a chance that the newfound boson wouldn't mesh with the Standard Model.

"If the new particle is determined to be the Higgs, attention will turn to a new set of important questions," University of California Irvine physicist Andy Lankford, the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, said in a statement. "Is this a Standard Model Higgs, or is it a variant that indicates new physics and other new particles?"

In that scenario, studying the Higgs could open the way for explorations of the weirder corners of physics, such as the idea that our universe has six or seven extra dimensions, or the claim that there should be an unseen supersymmetric partner for every one of the subatomic particles that have been detected, or the nature of the stuff that mysterious dark matter is made of.

In a CERN Bulletin interview, theoretical physicist Ignatios Antoniadis said the discovery could rule out some of the options for theories on the nature of the universe: "Because of its low mass, such a Higgs boson would allow us to rule out theories known as 'Technicolor' and some of the theoretical models used in supersymmetry. However, other supersymmetric-or-not scenarios could still apply, as well as extradimensional theories."

CERN

British physicist Peter Higgs accepts a round of applause during the CERN seminar at which researchers announced the discovery of a particle with the characteristics he predicted.

The discovery also could send Peter Higgs, who is still active in the field at the age of 83, to the top of the line for a Nobel Prize in physics. Higgs, a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and several other physicists who were involved in formulating the theory attended today's CERN briefing.

After the announcement, Higgs offered his congratulations to everyone involved in the LHC experiments. "To me, it's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime," he said before choking up with emotion.

Metrics for a discovery
To claim a formal discovery, the results from the LHC had to reach a confidence level of 5 sigma, which means there'd be just one chance in 3 million that the findings are a statistical fluke. Earlier this week, researchers at Fermilab in Illinois shared what they said were their final results from the Tevatron collider, which has been eclipsed by the LHC and was shut down last year. The results of their Higgs quest came up to a level of only 2.5 sigma — not enough to count as a true discovery.

Today, Incandela announced that the results from the CMS detector in one of the expected decay modes for the Higgs boson had a "combined significance of 5 standard deviations." Word of that measurement was greeted with applause in the CERN auditorium.

"It's nice to be at 5," Incandela said.

Other results from CMS, however, fell just short of the 5-sigma standard — and in at least one decay mode, the expected signs of the Higgs were not present at all. That could be just a fluke in the data, but Incandela said the analysis would continue with more readings. When all the results were combined, the confidence level for CMS was set at 4.9 sigma, he said.

Gianotti, meanwhile, said the combined results from the ATLAS experiment reached 5 sigma, signaling a discovery. That revelation, too, drew applause. In at least one of the decay modes, the readings from ATLAS were much higher that what would be expected for the Standard Model Higgs — but it's too early to tell whether that is merely a statistical anomaly or the sign of an unexpected twist that theorists will have to wrestle with.

"This is just the beginning," Gianotti said. "There is more to come."

In a news release, CERN said the results would be published in a scientific journal around the end of the month, and more data would lead to firmer conclusions by the end of the year.

Reactions to the particle discovery:

• Physicist Stephen Hawking, in an interview with the BBC's Pallab Ghosh: "The results at Fermilab in America, and CERN in Switzerland, strongly suggest that we have found the Higgs particle — the particle that gives mass to other particles. If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, that will be strong evidence for the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains all our experiments so far. This is an important result, and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize. But it is a pity, in a way, because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect. For this reason, I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found. It seems I have just lost $100."
• CERN Director General Rolf Heuer: "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
• CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci: "It’s hard not to get excited by these results. We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data."
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu:"I congratulate the thousands of scientists around the globe for their outstanding work in searching for the Higgs boson. Today's announcement on the latest results of this search shows the benefits of sustained investments in basic science by governments around the world. Scientists have been looking for the Higgs particle for more than two decades; these results help validate the Standard Model used by scientists to explain the nature of matter."
• Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's TRIUMF particle physics lab: "With ATLAS and the LHC, we set sail in the direction toward what we thought was the land of the Higgs. Last December, we saw a smudge on the horizon and knew we could be getting close to land. With these latest results, we've seen the shoreline! We know we’ll make it to dry land, but the ship is not in to shore just yet."
• Peter Knight, president of the Institute of Physics: "This is the physics version of the discovery of DNA.  It sets the course for a brand new adventure in our efforts to understand the fabric of our universe. ... Akin to a moon mission, one of the most remarkable things about the hunt for the Higgs is how the effort has caught the public imagination.  Not since the Apollo missions 40 years ago has there been such a sense of popular excitement around scientific discovery.  Long may this continue to inspire the next generation of scientists."

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• Video: Michio Kaku on the discovery
• Theorist Peter Higgs lives to see his boson
• PhotoBlog: Subatomic snoozing
• The Higgs boson made simple
• Leaked video says Higgs-like particle observed
• Has Higgs been found? Almost
• How the Higgs gives things mass
• Higgs boson hits new highs
• Ups and downs for Higgs boson buzz
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• Flash graphic: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Flash graphic: Michio Kaku on LHC nightmares and dreams
• Msnbc.com's special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Some of the (other) blogs with Higgs boson updates:

• ViXra.org: Physicist Philip Gibbs blogs about boson buzz.
• Not Even Wrong: Columbia physicist Peter Woit's blog.
• Resonaances: Adam Falkowski counts down to H-Hour.
• Cosmic Variance: Sean Carroll and company weigh in.
• Quantum Diaries: Aidan Randle-Conde tracks Higgs hunt.
• A Quantum Diaries Survivor: Tommaso Dorigo on the case.
• Of Particular Significance: Reality check from Matt Strassler.
• The Guardian: Live-blogging the CERN announcement.

Last updated 9 p.m. ET July 4.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

So what's the Higgs boson, and why are people spending billions of dollars to find that god-danged subatomic particle? I've rounded up a variety of resources aimed at showing you why the hunt for the Higgs is a big deal.

First, a little context: The Higgs particle, and its associated field, were hypothesized back in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs and others to fill a weird gap in the Standard Model, one of physics' most successful theories. The model as it stood had no mechanism to explain why some particles are massless (such as the photon, which is the quantum bit for light and other types of electromagnetic radiation), while other particles have varying degrees of mass (such as the W and Z bosons, which play a part in the weak nuclear force). By rights, all particles should be without mass and zipping around freely.

The Higgs mechanism sets up a field that interacts with particles to endow them with mass, and the Higgs boson is the particle associated with that field — just as photons are associated with an electromagnetic field. For more than four decades, physicists have assumed that the Higgs field existed, but found no experimental evidence for it. It requires a super-powerful particle smasher such as the Large Hadron Collider to produce energies high enough to knock a Higgs boson into existence under controlled conditions.

But the heavy particles created in a collider exist for just an instant before they decay into lighter particles. The LHC's physicists have been looking for particular patterns in the spray of particles that match what they'd expect to see from the decay of the Higgs boson. They've collected data for roughly a quadrillion proton-on-proton collisions, and on Wednesday they'll announce the status of the Higgs search based on those conclusions. (Tune in the webcast.)

The teams at the LHC's ATLAS and CMS detectors are likely to say they're pretty sure they see a new type of particle with Higgs-like characteristics, but will need more time to nail down those characteristics completely. If that's the case, physicists can then go on to find out if the Higgs mechanism works exactly the way they expected it to, or whether there are unexpected twists. Some of the theories about how the universe is put together are pretty far-out — for example, suggesting that there are several dimensions in space that we can't perceive directly, or that there are huge troops of subatomic particles that we haven't yet discovered. Following the tracks left behind by the Higgs could reveal whether there's any truth to those theories.

Analogies, please!
For decades, experts have been trying to come up with analogies to illustrate how the Higgs mechanism works. One of the best-known was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson.

The Guardian's Ian Sample demonstrates a variant of this analogy in a 4.5-minute video: Imagine a tray with ping-pong balls scattered on it. The balls roll freely around the empty tray. But then, if you spread a layer of sugar over the tray, the balls sitting on the piled-up sugar don't roll so easily. The grains of sugar introduce a kind of inertial "drag," and that's the kind of effect that the Higgs field supposedly has on particles with mass.

In a 60-second shot of science written for Symmetry magazine, Howard Haber of the University of California at Santa Cruz uses a livelier comparison to a high-speed bullet plowing through a vat of molasses.

What good is it?
Particle physicists try to avoid forecasting the applications of an experimental advance before the actual advance is confirmed, but in the past, advances on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson have had lots of beneficial applications, and some that are more questionable. The rise of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry is a prime example of that double-edged sword.

The discovery of antimatter is what made medical PET scanning possible, and antimatter propulsion could eventually play a part in interstellar travel, just like on "Star Trek." Particle accelerators have opened the way to medical treatments such as proton eye therapy — as well as advances in materials science, thanks to neutron scattering.

It's conceivable that the discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider will eventually point to new sources of energy, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, told me during a discussion of the LHC's promise and peril. And if the discovery of the Higgs leads to fresh insights into the fabric of the universe, it's conceivable that we could take advantage of the as-yet-unknown weave of that fabric for communication or transportation. Who knows? Maybe this is how "Star Trek" gets its start.

Visualizing the Higgs
If one picture can be worth a thousand words, how much are six videos worth? Here are half a dozen videos that delve more deeply into the Higgs boson and its significance. Be sure to tune in CERN's webcast starting at 3 a.m. ET for the latest revelations.

Silly and serious talk about the Higgs boson: 

• Higgs-like leak? Video says new particle observed at LHC
• Here's how the famous Higgs particle gives things mass
• Contest for Higgs explanations: The Waldegrave Higgs Challenge
• Humor from the Borowitz Report: 5 questions for the Higgs boson
• Les Horribles Cernettes sing 'Hey, Mr. Higgs'
• National Geographic: The God Particle
• BBC: Science of the Higgs boson explained
• Berkeley Lab: What's up with the Higgs?

Some of the (other) blogs to watch for Higgs boson updates:

• ViXra.org: Physicist Philip Gibbs blogs about boson buzz.
• Not Even Wrong: Columbia physicist Peter Woit's blog.
• Resonaances: Adam Falkowski counts down to H-Hour.
• Cosmic Variance: Sean Carroll and company weigh in.
• Quantum Diaries: Aidan Randle-Conde tracks Higgs hunt.
• A Quantum Diaries Survivor: Tommaso Dorigo on the case.
• Of Particular Significance: Reality check from Matt Strassler.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Michael Hoch / CERN file

The Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, dwarfs workers at the Large Hadron Collider during construction work in 2007. A leader of the CMS' scientific team says in a CERN video that physicists have observed a new particle that may have characteristics consistent with the Higgs boson.

A mistakenly leaked video from Europe's CERN particle-physics center reports that a new subatomic particle has been observed at the Large Hadron Collider, in the range where the long-sought Higgs boson is expected to lurk. The video has now been put into password-protected status, and CERN says viewers shouldn't "take anything for granted" until a much-anticipated seminar on the Higgs boson hunt takes place on Wednesday.

"We've observed a new particle. ... We have quite strong evidence that there's something there," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC's CMS experiment, said in the video, which was discovered by Science News on CERN's website. "So, to ascertain its properties is still going to take us a little bit of time."

Incandela said the particle has some of the characteristics associated with the Higgs boson, which plays a key role in hypotheses that explain why some subatomic particles have mass while others don't. Finding the Higgs is a key target of the $10 billion LHC project. Its discovery could open the way to new frontiers in physics, such as the study of extra dimensions and supersymmetry.

Consistent with the Higgs
The physicist said that the particle decayed into two photons, in a way consistent with Higgs' behavior. He also said it's 130 times as massive as a proton — which is within the expected mass range for the Higgs.

"This is very significant," said Incandela, a physicist from the University of California at Santa Barbara who was the first U.S. scientist to be elected spokesperson for an LHC experiment. "This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this, which I think we will. ... This is something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomena that we've had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks."

If the particle's characteristics correspond to the predictions provided by some of the theories on the frontier of physics, "then we're really seeing something very, very closely tied to the  fabric of space and time, something that's really fundamental to the universe, and that represents a major discovery, perhaps as big as the discovery of quarks, perhaps as big as the discovery of antimatter," Incandela said.

Incandela characterized the CMS team's find as "very strong evidence," but he downplayed the use of the word "discovery" — a word that physicists reserve only for the most solid findings, with only one chance out of 3 million that the result is a statistical fluke. Instead, he emphasized the term "observation," which he said means that the particle is "definitely there, and it's very unlikely to go away."

He said the particle could be the kind of Higgs boson that fits perfectly with the existing theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, or it could be an unorthodox type of particle that doesn't fit the model. "If that's the case, then we have something really profound here," he said. "It could be a gateway to the next phase of exploring the deepest parts of the fabric of our universe."

He emphasized that CMS' results were only preliminary, and did not refer to any claims from the ATLAS collaboration, the other team most heavily involved in the search for the Higgs. But he did say he expected the results to be sufficiently confirmed to lead to a scientific publication by the end of July.

"We're very excited," Incandela said.

A tipoff? Or a red herring?
The video, which was dated July 4, appeared to provide a tipoff to the announcement planned for Wednesday. Incandela's comments reflected what the pre-announcement buzz has been: that the CMS and ATLAS teams observed an anomalous particle with the characteristics of the Higgs, with a confidence level close to that required to claim a discovery. 

However, this was just one video interview with one senior researcher, and it's not clear how much the video will reflect what the team leaders will say at the seminar. When the video came to light, outside physicists cautioned that the full story may turn out to be different.

"Really, we need to see ATLAS and CMS data side by side, e.g., are peaks in the same places?" theoretical physicist Robert Garisto, an editor at Physical Review Letters, told me in a Twitter conversation. On the other hand, he said, "I wouldn't bet against the Higgs now."

CERN spokesman James Gillies struck a similar note of caution. He told me today that the Incandela interview was "one of several videos that we recorded to cover all the bases." CERN tried to keep all of the advance videos password-protected, to guard against premature release, but "one of them became visible for a short period of time ... we don't know why."

The ATLAS and CMS teams, from their spokespersons on down, are trying to abide by Wednesday's embargo on their findings.

"Until the seminar tomorrow, don't take anything for granted," Gillies told me. You can watch CERN's webcast of the particle-physics fireworks beginning at 3 a.m. ET.

Update for 2:30 p.m. ET: Credit for spotting the video on the CERN website goes to Science News' Kate Travis.

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• Has Higgs been found? Almost
• How the Higgs gives things mass
• Higgs boson hits new highs
• Ups and downs for Higgs boson buzz
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• Flash graphic: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Flash graphic: Michio Kaku on LHC nightmares and dreams
• Msnbc.com's special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists at America's top particle-physics facility, Fermilab, today revealed their almost-final array of almost-strong evidence for the existence of the elusive Higgs boson — in advance of what's expected to be the almost-discovery of the subatomic particle at the Large Hadron Collider, almost half a world away.

The results are based on the full batch of data gathered at Fermilab's Tevatron experiment over the course of more than a decade, and Fermilab said the findings represented the "strongest indication to date for the long-sought Higgs particle" from the separate teams behind the Tevatron's CDF and DZero detectors.

"The Tevatron experiments accomplished the goals that we had set with this data sample," CDF co-spokesperson Rob Roser said in a news release about the revelation. "Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery."

Discovery of the Higgs boson is the top objective for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, which was started up almost four years ago. Physicists have theorized about the particle and its associated Higgs field for four decades, working it in as a key part of the Standard Model, one of physics' most successful theories. The Higgs field is thought to be the mechanism that imparts mass to some particles while leaving other particles massless. What's more, the Higgs mechanism could serve as a gateway for going beyond the Standard Model and exploring way-out concepts such as supersymmetry and extra dimensions.

No wonder, then, that Nobel-winning Fermilab physicist Leon Lederman dubbed it "the God Particle" almost two decades ago. (Today, most physicists wish he hadn't.)

Fermilab via AFP - Getty Images

The 4-mile-round (6.4-kilometer-round) Tevatron accelerator was shut down last year, but researchers have just released what they say is their final analysis of data from the Tevatron experiments relating to the search for the Higgs boson.

Over the past year, results from Fermilab in Illinois as well as from the LHC on the French-Swiss border have focused in on a "bump" of anomalous data, hinting at an unknown particle with a mass of 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. Two big questions have been hanging in the air: How precisely can the mass be determined? And how sure can the scientists be that what they're seeing is real, rather than merely a fluke in the data?

The Fermilab teams' almost-final answer is that a particle like the Higgs boson can lurk only in the area between 115 and 135 GeV, and they say there's just a 1-in-550 chance that the bump they're seeing is a random fluctuation. Another way of expressing the statistical confidence in the results is to say that it's at the 2.9-sigma level in the bottom-quark decay mode, and 2.5 sigma overall.

That level falls just short of the 3-sigma standard that physicists have been using for "strong evidence" of a subatomic particle's existence, and far short of the 5-sigma standard for "discovery." The 5-sigma level is equivalent to 99.99994 percent confidence. This is why Roser said actually establishing a discovery will have to be up to the LHC.

At least an almost-discovery
As it happens, Europe's CERN particle-physics center has scheduled an announcement about the LHC's search on Wednesday, and for the past couple of weeks, onlookers have been wondering whether this will mark the true 5-sigma discovery of the Higgs boson. Last December, the teams behind the LHC's ATLAS and CMS detectors reported that they saw "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs at 125 GeV, with confidence levels of 3.6 sigma for ATLAS and 2.6 sigma for CMS.

Since that time, the detectors have doubled the amount of data collected, and the energy level for the LHC's collisions has ramped up to four times what was achievable at Fermilab's Tevatron. That has raised expectations that the LHC's results will come close to or even exceed the 5-sigma confidence standard, depending on how Wednesday's announcement is spun.

"What we saw in December suggests that the real fireworks will be on the Fourth of July," said Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, author of "The Quantum Frontier."

Fermilab

A graphic from Fermilab shows the "bump" that hints at the existence of the Higgs boson in a mass region from 115 to 135 GeV.

Advance indications suggest that the ATLAS and CMS teams both have higher confidence that they're really seeing a particle matching the Higgs boson's description — in the range of 4.5 to 5 sigma, according to Nature. Some of the advance rumblings suggest that the results from the two detectors would have to be combined to get past 5 — but CERN says that particular statistical twist won't figure into this week's announcement.

"Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday," CERN spokesman James Gillies told The Associated Press.

Even if one detector — say, ATLAS — were to get past 5, some physicists might still question the results. After all, the researchers who reported clocking neutrinos at speeds faster than light were pretty sure of their results, too, until they found a flaw in their fiber-optic timing system. But if the findings are as solid as the latest reports suggest, all this hand-wringing over the technical definition of a discovery may be a merely academic matter.

"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, ''It looks like a discovery,'" CERN physicist John Ellis told AP. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."

The Large Hadron Collider is continuing to run, and ATLAS and CMS are continuing to collect data. Even if the results being announced this week turn out to be merely an almost-discovery, the matter will certainly be settled by the end of the year, as predicted.

Then what?

After the discovery
Discovering the Higgs boson, or something like it, would just be the start of the real work to be conducted at the LHC: Is the Higgs mechanism totally in sync with what's predicted by the Standard Model? How does particle mass arise in the Higgs field? Are there any anomalous trails that could be followed to new frontiers in physics? This is where the results from Fermilab's Tevatron could come into play again.

Researchers at the LHC and the Tevatron can't detect the Higgs boson directly. Instead, they check a number of pathways by which the particle decays into other particles that can be detected — two photons, for example, or a pair of bottom quarks. To nail down the particle's characteristics completely, observations will have to be analyzed from multiple pathways.

"Being able to see it decaying into photons, and seeing it also in bottom quarks gives us some confidence that it's the Standard Model Higgs — and not some cousin particle that's similar to, but different from what the Standard Model predicts," Fermilab's Lincoln said. "Or, if you want to be terribly perverse, it could be some particle we haven't seen before, but not the Higgs at all."

If the LHC reports a discovery at the 125-GeV mass level, that would provide a new focus for Fermilab. "Once it's established that there's something to look at, we'll be able to retool the analyses to try to work out the question of what it is we're seeing," Lincoln said. Knowing for sure that there's something actually there, at 125 GeV, will allow physicists to fine-tune their analytical tools. 

Fermilab shut down the Tevatron almost a year ago, so no new data can be collected at that collider. But the Tevatron data, when used in combination with the data that will continue to flood from the LHC, could still contribute to solving some of the deepest questions in physics. "The story is not over," Lincoln said.

The big story on July 4
Here are some websites to watch leading up to Wednesday's big reveal:

• CERN webcast: Latest update in the search for the Higgs, with seminar at 3 a.m. ET and news conference at 5 a.m. ET Wednesday.
• ViXra.org: Physicist Philip Gibbs blogs about boson buzz.
• Not Even Wrong: Columbia physicist Peter Woit's blog.
• Resonaances: Adam Falkowski counts down to H-Hour.
• Cosmic Variance: Sean Carroll and company weigh in.
• Quantum Diaries: Aidan Randle-Conde tracks Higgs hunt.
• A Quantum Diaries Survivor: Tommaso Dorigo on the case.
• Of Particular Significance: Reality check from Matt Strassler.
• Cosmic Log archive on search for Higgs boson.
• Inside the Big Bang Machine: Special report on the LHC.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.