ATLAS Collaboration / CERN

This diagram shows the results of a proton-on-proton collision in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector last September, with four muons indicated by red tracks. Such a result could be consistent with the Standard Model with or without the Higgs boson, depending on the analysis of multiple events.

Has the Higgs boson finally been detected? It's almost gotten to the point that if a discovery of some sort doesn't come out of next week's update on the multibillion-dollar subatomic search, it'll be a big surprise. But how far will the announcement go, and what will it mean for the future of physics?

To refresh your memory, the Higgs boson is the only fundamental subatomic particle predicted by theory but not yet detected. It's thought to play a role in endowing some particles, such as the W and Z boson, with mass ... while leaving other particles, such as the photon, massless. The Higgs mechanism, proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s, could have played a role in electroweak symmetry breaking, which was a key event in the rise of the universe as we know it.

The Higgs boson is so key to the current understanding of fundamental physics that Nobel-winning scientist Leon Lederman nicknamed it the "God Particle" — a term that has been making other physicists wince ever since. Another religion-tinged cliche would be to call it the "holy grail of particle physics," as CERN physicist John Ellis has. He says finding the Higgs is a key goal for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"That's one thing that we're really looking forward to with the LHC," Ellis told me five years ago. "In fact, back when we persuaded the politicians to stump up the money to build the thing, that's probably what we told them."

Last December, the teams reported that they saw "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs' existence at a mass of around 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. But the confidence in those results was not yet high enough to claim a discovery. Now the teams behind the collider's CMS and ATLAS experiments have collected higher piles of data, at higher energy levels, sparking higher expectations.

The 5-sigma fetish
When physicists talk about their confidence, they talk in terms of statistical "sigma" levels. The higher the sigma, the less likely that the results are just a fluke. In particle physics, 3 sigma constitutes strong evidence, but it takes 5 sigma to accept the results as a discovery. At the 5-sigma level, statisticians say there's roughly one chance out of 3 million that you're leaping to the wrong conclusion, as opposed to a 1-in-1,000 chance at the 3-sigma level. That distinction makes a big difference when you're sifting through billions upon billions of proton-on-proton collision reports.

Last year, the best that the LHC teams could do was 3.6 sigma for ATLAS, and 2.6 for CMS. Now physicists are looking for a 5.

For three weeks, the teams have been running the numbers on their experimental results in secret, so as to avoid any chance that one analysis will influence the other. Their results are to be announced during a presentation at the CERN nuclear research center in Geneva, which will be webcast starting at 9 a.m. CEST (3 a.m. ET) on July 4. Although no official word has leaked out, the unofficial word is that someone looking for a discovery could get to the magic number.

"Reports from the experiments indicate that at least one of them, if not both, will reach the 5 sigma level of significance for the Higgs signal, when they combine 2011 and 2012 data and the most sensitive channel. So, this will definitely be the long-awaited Higgs discovery announcement, and party time for HEP [high-energy physics] physicists," Columbia mathematician Peter Woit wrote on his Not Even Wrong blog a week ago.

Since then, other physicist-bloggers have been fine-tuning the expectations. Here's a selection:

• On the Resonaances blog, physicist Adam Falkowski (a.k.a. Jester) has a countdown clock ticking toward the Higgs discovery. "It is not clear, at least to me, if either of the two experiments will pass the 5-sigma fetish. But it does not really matter. ... What's going to change next Wednesday is that the status of the Higgs will be upgraded from 'almost certain' to 'beyond reasonable doubt.'"
• On Quantum Diaries, Southern Methodist University physicist Aidan Randle-Conde advises against trying to combine the data from the two teams to get to 5 sigma. "With all this pressure to get as much out of the data as possible, it's tempting to move too quickly and do what we can to get a discovery, but now is not the time to rush things," he writes.
• On the ViXra Log, Philip Gibbs says that when CERN's researchers report their progress, "it is likely that the main question they are investigating will switch from 'Is there a Higgs Boson?' to 'Is it the Standard Model Higgs boson?'"
• On a blog titled "Of Particular Significance," Rutgers physicist Matt Strassler advises caution, but also suggests getting "the cases of champagne ready, in case the time has finally come to pop the corks." He points out that a discovery announcement would by no means be the end of the story. "Even if we see strong evidence of a Higgs-like particle ... the correct understanding of that particle — in particular, determining whether it is or isn't a 'simplest Higgs' — may take years."
• As we approach H-Hour, you can expect to hear more via all these outlets as well as other blogs such as Cosmic Variance and "A Quantum Diaries Survivor."

Hedging on the Higgs
What Strassler and Gibbs are saying is important: Technically speaking, CERN is unlikely to announce that the Higgs boson has been definitively discovered. It's more likely that physicists will talk about a new particle that has a signature consistent with the Higgs but has to be investigated further.

CERN hinted at that approach last week in the news release announcing Wednesday's webcast. "It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar," said the center's director general, Rolf Heuer. "Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it's really your best friend, or actually your best friend's twin."

Gigi Rolandi, a senior research physicist at CERN, used a similar analogy in a video released this week, referring to crops of corn (which he calls maize, as most Europeans do), wheat (which he calls corn) and poppy flowers. Some particles are as easy to spot as a red poppy in a wheat field, he said. But not the Higgs. "The search for the Higgs is more similar to looking for a single plant of maize among many, many corn plants, than looking for a poppy among the corn," he said.

We'll get a foretaste of Wednesday's proceedings on Monday, when Fermilab is due to provide its final update on the Higgs boson search, based on the full set of data from the now-closed Tevatron. Will Fermilab try to steal some of CERN's thunder, at least for a couple of days? Stay tuned....

Update for 12:05 p.m. ET June 30: Some commenters are asking whether there are practical applications for the discoveries that could be made at the Large Hadron Collider. I addressed that question in a story I wrote four years ago, headlined "Discovery or Doom? Collider Stirs Debate." Please check out the article, as well as the Flash interactive on "Nightmares and Dreams" at the LHC.

Update for 6 p.m. ET July 1: To watch streaming video of the Fermilab Higgs update at 9 a.m. CT (10 a.m. ET) Monday, click through to this Web link.

The buzz leading uo to H-Hour is getting even louder, as expected. The Daily Mail reports that some of the theorists behind the Higgs boson concept have been invited to the CERN briefing on Wednesday, which some observers see as another sign that something definitive will be announced. Also, Reuters' Robert Evans keeps the buzz humming in a dispatch published today.

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• 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.

CERN / CMS Collaboration

A computer graphic shows a typical Higgs boson candidate event, including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured in the Compact Muon Solenoid's electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume represents the CMS' crystal calorimeter barrel.

A week ago, sources started passing the word that physicists were "fired up" about further evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model and the main quarry for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

That blaze of buzz reached a high point this week, when Columbia mathematician Peter Woit reported "reliable rumors" that the confidence level for a detection of the Higgs' signature in the mass range of around 125 billion electron-volts, or 125 GeV, was increasing.

"CERN will soon have to decide how to spin this: will they announce discovery of the Higgs, or will they wait for some overwhelmingly convincing standard to be met, such as 5 sigma in at least one channel of one experiment?" Woit wrote.

"Sigma" refers to the statistical confidence that a given result is more than a fluke, with 5 sigma serving as the gold standard for a discovery. If you're a Higgs-watcher, you'll be hearing a lot about sigma in the next couple of weeks, leading up to the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, or ICHEP, in Australia from July 4 to 11. That's when the LHC's teams are due to provide a status report on the search for the Higgs. 

The Higgs hunt is hot because physicists have hypothesized about the boson for 40 years as part of the mechanism by which some particles acquire mass while others don't. The Higgs is so fundamental to the frontier of physics that Fermilab's Leon Lederman once called it the "God Particle" — a term that most other physicists positively hate. Finding it in the mass range where it's expected to be would serve as solid confirmation for the Standard Model, one of the most successful theories in the history of science. Not finding it would be more interesting: Physicists would have to consider some other mechanism, outside the Standard Model, to explain particle mass. And there's nothing theorists love more than a challenge like that.

In December, the teams behind the ATLAS and CMS detectors reported "tantalizing hints" of a Higgs detection at 125 GeV, with confidence levels of 3.6 sigma for ATLAS and 2.6 sigma for CMS. If the additional observations made since then show the same sorts of hints, those sigma levels should go up — and that's been the gist of the buzz over the last week or so. For science geeks, that's a big deal, or at least a big meme: so big that the hashtag #HiggsRumors was for a time on top of Twitter's trending list, Discovery News' Jennifer Ouelette noted.

A lot of that trending took place because of the in-jokes spawned by the original buzz — which has now fallen to a steady hum, thanks to a string of reality checks.

"Please do not believe the blogs," ATLAS spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti told The New York Times. "I am very surprised that rumors appear on a subject that is really evolving daily," CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli told Science News. "The experimenters can't possibly have their data in presentable form yet, so the rumors can't be correct in every detail," Rutgers theoretical physicist Matt Strassler observed on his blog.

Union College physicist Chad Orzel, the author of "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," said the celebrity-level hype was "the price of success":

"I mean, it’s not an accident that there’s a lot of excitement about the maybe-sorta-kinda discovery of the Higgs. This is the product of years of relentless hype from the particle physics community. They've been talking about this goddamn particle for longer than I've been running this blog, and it's finally percolated out into the general public consciousness enough that buzz about it can trend on Twitter. Complaining that your persistent effort to get people to care about particle physics esoterica has led to people being excited about particle physics esoterica seems more than a little churlish.

"So, lighten up. Revel in the success of your hype machine. God knows, if there were a Twitter trending topic about Bose-Einstein Condensation or anything else in atomic physics, I’d do the Happy Dance all the way down the hall. You’ve worked hard to make your elusive particle a celebrity, now reap the rewards."

The true reaping will come in a couple of weeks. As Reuters' Robert Evans reported, the most recent readings from ATLAS and CMS are being analyzed in isolation, so that one team's conclusions don't influence the other team. Until the ICHEP actually takes place, hype is just about all we'll hear about. But in the meantime, get ready for the real news by reviewing these resources:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• What's a boson? Tour the particle zoo
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider
• Search msnbc.com for the Higgs boson

Update for 1 p.m. ET June 22: Europe's CERN particle-physics center just announced that the big update on the Higgs search will come on July 4, during a seminar at 3 a.m. ET that's tied to the start of the ICHEP conference. 

"We now have more than double the data we had last year," CERN's director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci, was quoted as saying. "That should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they’ve gone away. It’s a very exciting time."

CERN said that if a new particle is discovered, the ATLAS and CMS teams will need more time to ascertain whether it's the Higgs.

"It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer explained. "Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it’s really your best friend, or actually your best friend's twin."

CERN said physicists at the conference in Melbourne will be able to join the seminar via a live two-way link. The seminar will be followed by a news conference at CERN. There'll be a webcast available via http://webcast.cern.ch. Stay tuned...

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.

The prime target for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider is discovery and study of the Higgs boson — but what the heck is the Higgs, and what's it supposed to do? PHD Comics' Jorge Cham explains the quest in an animated cartoon that draws upon the expertise of Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist from the University of California at Irvine who's working at Europe's CERN research center.

The Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the "God Particle," is thought to be the force-carrier for a field that endows subatomic particles with varying values of mass. British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized that it must exist to fill out a gap in physics' Standard Model of particle physics, but it hasn't yet been detected. Scientists expect it to turn up at the LHC, or else they might have to go back to the drawing boards and rework the Standard Model.

Almost two decades ago, Britain's science minister challenged experts to come up with an everyday explanation for the way the Higgs worked, and physicist David Miller came up with a comparison to Margaret Thatcher making her way through a crowded cocktail party. Whiteson and Cham use the analogy of marbles rolling across a floor, which works, too. Check out the big-format animated version on the PHD Comics Web site or on Vimeo.

If physicists at the LHC get their way, the discussion of the Higgs boson could get a lot less theoretical by the end of this year, thanks to the increase in power levels and data return from the LHC and its particle detectors. However, Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports today that the readings from hundreds of trillions of collisions are piling up so fast that the computers are having a hard time keeping up with the analysis. He writes that all those collisions are growing into a "thick fog" that threatens to obscure the signature of the elusive Higgs. Researchers are using clever computational techniques to separate the wheat from the chaff, data-wise, and are prepared to dial back the collision rate if necessary.

If it sounds as if the physicists have it rough, just imagine how the particles must feel. That's exactly what animator Karen Cheung, Oxford physicist Alan Barr and their colleagues did in a cartoon that was created for the Oxford Sparks Web portal. Enjoy!

More about the Higgs and the LHC:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• 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

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.

The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away. One of the group's experiments, known as OPERA, turned up evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.

This year, particle physicists are aiming to get definitive answers to the questions that consumed them last year: Does the Higgs boson, potentially the final fundamental piece of the Standard Model puzzle, actually exist? Could there be new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is arguably the most successful scientific theory of the 20th century?

And just as importantly, can neutrinos really fly faster than light, as findings from Italian lab suggested last year?

"I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time." Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Europe's CERN particle physics center, joked today during a scientific meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Physicists recapped the past year's results and looked ahead to the next year during sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — and if their expectations come to pass, 2012 could be a big year for textbook editors.

First, about those neutrinos: Experiments conducted by the OPERA collaboration at CERN on the French-Swiss border and at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory clocked particles traveling the 450 miles (732 kilometers) between the labs at speeds slightly higher than the speed of light. That would run counter to a century's worth of special-relativity experiments, which has led most scientists to suspect some subtle factor went unaccounted for in the experiment. However, the skeptics haven't yet shown definitively where where the OPERA scientists went wrong, which "means that essentially they've done their job," Bertolucci said.

He said there were five efforts under way to re-examine or replicate the OPERA team's experimental results. One such effort would involve the MINOS neutrino experiment headquartered at Fermilab in Illinois. Rob Roser, a staff scientist at Fermilab, said the neutrino test required the installation of more sensitive detection equipment, and now that the equipment is ready, data would be collected in April. The results of the replication efforts should be in hand by the end of the year. 

The faster-than-light effect is so subtle that physicists would find it hard to accept even if a similar effect is detected by other experiments. But Bertolucci recalled that similarly unexpected results from the Michelson-Morley experiment, more than a century ago, eventually led to Albert Einstein's revolutionary work on relativity.

"We have to just keep an open mind," Bertolucci said.

Quest for the Higgs
The discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that could explain the phenomenon of mass and masslessness, is the year's other coming attraction in particle physics. For the past few years, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider have been in friendly competition to pick up the first hints of the particle's existence. And even though the Tevatron was shut down last September, the teams analyzing the last of their results could still "steal Sergio's thunder," Roser said.

Roser, who is the leader of the Tevatron's CDF collaboration, said scientists were in the "final throes" of data analysis and would announce their results relating to the Higgs boson at a March conference in Italy.

"We will be able to say something interesting, though whether it's that we don’t see it or we do see it remains to be seen," he said.

Late last year, the LHC teams said they saw hints that the Higgs boson might exist at a mass-energy level of 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. Those hints were too tentative to count as a discovery, however, and it sounds as if the same might hold true for the Tevatron results. Roser said he and his colleagues think the Tevatron's detectors could spot a 125 GeV Higgs boson at a 3-sigma confidence level — which is short of the standard for a discovery.

Bertolucci repeated his view that the LHC will determine "by the end of 2012" whether or not the type of Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model exists. Workers are due to clear out of the LHC's underground tunnels next week, and after a cooldown period, the collider will once again start shooting proton beams into detectors at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.

Bertolucci said the LHC has grown "from an infant to a very, very healthy teenager" over the past year, and CERN's plans call for the beam energies to be ramped up from 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion electron volts this year.

The Higgs boson ranks as one of physics' most famous "known unknowns," Bertolucci said. "But we hope for unknown unknowns," he added. 2012 could be the year that the LHC points to new physics beyond the Standard Model, perhaps having to do with supersymmetry, mini-black holes or extra dimensions.

If the Higgs is found, that would confirm once again that the Standard Model provides the correct description of the subatomic world, and physicists would rejoice. But Bertolucci said "I would be more excited if we don't find it."

"If the Higgs mechanism is not there, another mechanism must be there," he explained. It turns out that particle physicists, like fans of detective novels, love a mystery.

Closing in on the W boson
While we're waiting for the next chapter in the Higgs quest, Fermilab's scientists are getting ready to unveil yet another piece of the subatomic particle puzzle. They'll announce the latest estimate of the mass of the W boson on Feb. 23, Roser said. That's significant, not only because it helps nail down another key value in the Standard Model, but also because an accurate measurement of the W boson can tell physicists more precisely where to look for evidence of the Higgs boson. Symmetry magazine illustrates the point with plush toys in a vise.

More on the frontiers of physics:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• What's a boson? Tour the particle zoo
• Special report on the Big Bang Machine
• Search msnbc.com for the Higgs boson
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

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

CERN

Lead-ion collisions recorded by the Large Hadron Collider's ALICE detector during this month's run show up in green on this graphic. Oxford physicist Frank Close says the LHC could solve cosmic puzzles.

In his new book, "The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe," Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades' worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved.

Close traces the decades-long effort to find the deep connections between the fundamental forces of nature and resolve the "infinity puzzle" — that is, the fact that the mathematics of quantum theory came up with nonsensical numbers. That puzzle was eventually solved, as Close describes in the book, but an even bigger puzzle remains: Why is the cosmos built the way it is?

Some clues could emerge from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, where physicists are looking for a mysterious particle known as the Higgs boson. Close delves into the strange role that the Higgs plays in contemporary physics, but he emphasizes that his latest book is about much more than the science.

"'The Infinity Puzzle' is not just another story about the physics of the LHC," he told me this week. "It's focusing on the people. Science is a pure ideal, but the scientists who do it are people. And we all have the same desires and pressures. ... There are heroes and villains in science, as there are everywhere."

Close's tale illustrates that the course of true science doesn't always run smooth. It may well turn out that the long-sought Higgs boson is a will-o'-the-wisp, and physicists will have to go back to square one. But even that won't render "The Infinity Puzzle" out of date. 

"If the Higgs boson turns out not to exist, and we have to completely rewrite everything, this book will show how we got to this conundrum," Close said. "And if it does exist, hopefully it will explain why it was so important."

The book is particularly timely, considering that this year's Nobel Prize ceremonies are due to take place in Stockholm and Oslo next week. During a wide-ranging interview, Close discussed his book as well as the people and the puzzles that inspired it. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Could you explain what the "infinity puzzle" is?

Frank Close: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the biggest experiment that particle physics has ever set out to do. It's trying to find the answer to why there is structure in the universe. The buzzword you hear is the Higgs boson, and the question is, who is Higgs, what's the boson, what's it all about?

Well, what it's all about is what "The Infinity Puzzle" is trying to answer. In telling the story, the book focuses on the people who brought us to this remarkable point in history. And in particular it focuses on a group of scientists who discovered two separate things, half a century ago. First, how to unite the electromagnetic force, the force that holds you and me together and makes magnets work, with the weak force of radioactivity, which plays a very important part in how the sun burns. This is called the electroweak theory today.

The other part of the story is how to make a theory, which works beautifully if there is no mass in anything at all, work in a world where particles have mass. That has become known as the Higgs mechanism, and the consummate object we're looking for is the Higgs boson. The questions surrounding whether these things are named correctly, whether the people who won Nobel Prizes in the past were the right people, and whether there are going to be controversies over Nobel Prizes in the future for all of these things — those are the themes of the book. It's about the politics of science, the way that people are driven to want to get the big prizes. Scientists suffer the same emotions that everybody else does.

Q: You touch on many of those personalities — some who received Nobels, and some who didn't but deserved to. Do those personalities actually shape the science? Are there things in the universe that we see in a particular way just because a scientist first described it in that way?

A: It's a very interesting question about the role of personality in being able to tease out the secrets of nature. There are some people who are strong mathematical calculators but don't necessarily have great vision. There are other people who have got great vision, but aren't particularly strong calculators. It's when these two types get together that rapid progress is often made.

Ultimately, there's a truth out there, and we're trying to find what it is. It's different for artists. If you're a Beethoven, if you're proposing some symphony and you don't publish it, the chance that somebody else will create the very same symphony someday ... well, that just doesn't happen. But in the case of science, nature has already constructed the symphony, and we're trying to find what it is.

The challenge is, suppose that you have uncovered a bit of the symphony, but you're not sure whether you want to go public with it, so you don't publish it. Then, a short time later, somebody else does publish it, a bit braver than you, and you realize that you were right all along. You've lost the credit. There's a certain point where you have to be brave enough to jump off the diving board and take the plunge, to mix in another metaphor. There are many examples of people who didn't take that last step, for one reason or another. You know the names of the winners, but you don't know the ones who didn't quite make it.

Q: When it comes to the Higgs boson, the question has arisen as to whether it actually exists. One of my colleagues has joked that if it's found, that's worth a Nobel. And if it's ruled out, that's worth a Nobel as well. Is that the way it works?

A: The idea that has led to the Higgs boson is a piece of beautiful mathematics. Whether nature actually does it is a question that only experiments can answer. Although the theorists are the ones that get all the press ... the Einsteins and the other names that trip off the tongue ... it's ultimately the experiments that decide. That's where we are at the moment.

The idea that there should be a Higgs boson, or something else that masquerades as that particle, has been around for a long time. It's only now that are finally able to do the experiments that will tell us one way or the other if that is the case. And if it is the case, we might find out exactly how nature plays this particular trick. When Peter Higgs and a group of other people first put the idea forward, they were trying to solve a particular conundrum, and they came up with the simplest way of doing it — that is, that there was a single particle known as the Higgs boson. That was 50 years ago. Since then, people have refined those original ideas, based on the discoveries we have made.

Basic Books

Oxford physicist Frank Close's book traces the decades-long quest to solve one of the biggest puzzles of quantum physics.

There are several possible ideas as to how nature might actually do this conjuring trick. It might be there's a whole family of particles called Higgsinos and other weird names. It might not be a simple particle. It might be a compound — just as an atom has a nucleus that's made of protons and neutrons, which are made of smaller things called quarks, there might be new sorts of particles waiting to be found, called techniquarks, which collectively act as if they were a single boson.

It might be those, it might be something else. We simply don't know. And that's the exciting thing. Nature knows the answer at the moment, and we're trying to find out at last what it is.

Q: Is the Higgs boson the only door to new physics, or are there other routes to going beyond the Standard Model of physics?

A: We certainly know that the Standard Model cannot be the final answer. It describes everything that we currently have explored, but there are many things we have to put in by hand. The mass of the electron is put in by hand. Why it is what it is, we don't know. But if it were different, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You start by putting in all these measured numbers, and then we can describe a vast amount of stuff. But there must be some richer theory out there that will show why the Standard Model is as it is. 

An analogy is Newton's laws of mechanics, which worked perfectly for hundreds of years. They were later incorporated inside Einstein's theory of relativity, which is a much richer, more powerful theory that includes Newton in it. We suspect there is a "theory of everything" out there which will contain the Standard Model. We are hoping we'll get close to the nature of that theory at the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is exploring regions of nature we've never been able to explore before. We've seen them from afar — it's a bit like knowing there's somebody around the corner but you haven't seen them yet.

We are entering new territory. We're creating in the laboratory the conditions that the universe experienced about a trillionth of a second after the big bang. There are observations that have taken us to a billionth of a second after the big bang, so we've been pretty near. You might think, "Oh, why would we want to get nearer?" It's because the stuff that you and I are made of was created in that cauldron of the big bang's aftermath, and there are puzzles yet to be solved.

For example, why is anything left today? Antimatter is real, and matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet. So why didn't the newborn universe annihilate itself after the big bang. There must be something that tipped the balance. What that is, we don't know for sure, but some hints are beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider.

The real thing is, we're exploring a new continent, and the LHC will show us what is there. That will then answer many of these questions —and if I knew the answers now, I'd be riding off to Stockholm.

Q: You mentioned the fact that some of the values in the Standard Model have to be put in by hand, and that scientists are trying to find out if there's a deeper theory that explains why those values are as they are. Some physicists have said that it might just be a lucky break that we have those values, and that our universe might be merely one of the "bubbles" sitting on the wider landscape of the multiverse. Do you subscribe to that landscape view of the multiverse?

A: Well, of course, the simple answer is, I don't know. And to be honest, nobody knows. I feel sometimes it's a bit of a cop-out. The universe I find myself in is difficult enough to describe. The idea that it is one of a huge number of universes ... that might indeed be true, but if we cannot experimentally answer whether it is true or not, I'm not sure whether the question is actually scientific. It's interesting philosophically. It's possible that someday we might be able to come up with an experiment that can answer whether there are other universes, but then you get into interesting tautological questions. The "universe" is presumably everything we can be aware of. If there are other universes that we cannot be aware of, then they're beyond the capability of science to investigate. But if they are investigatable through science, they are in a sense part of our universe.

The real question is this: Are the masses of electrons and other fundamental particles essential numbers in their own right, or are they no more fundamental than the radii of the planets around the sun? We don't know yet. I can't imagine anything that the Large Hadron Collider will discover that will give us a clear insight as to why particles have the masses that they do. But if we discover the Higgs boson, or whatever it is, we may well find out where mass comes from. And there may be some interesting quirk that comes out of that discovery that will give us a clue as to why the masses are as they are. The excitement of science is that until you've done it, you don't know.

Q: It seems to me that you were on a BBC program some years ago that touched on this whole discussion over whether a particle collider could destroy the world.

A: Yes, and the world hasn't ended yet.

Q: Some people would say the controversy was actually good for physics because it was a "teachable moment" that got people interested in physics. How do you see it?

A: Well, to be fair, it was a controversy that no scientist really subscribed to. It was something that somebody dreamt up, and it created an interesting sensation. But it does give the opportunity to explain what the Large Hadron Collider is and is not. The idea that we are doing things in the Large Hadron Collider that have never been done before is not the case. It's the first time that we have been able to do them. But the universe at large has collided particles together at energies far in excess of anything we do at the LHC or will ever be able to do. Cosmic rays in outer space are subatomic particles whipped into violent motion by magnetic fields in the cosmos — and they hit the upper atmosphere at energies far in excess of anything at the LHC.

Nature has done the experiments before, and we're still here. It's just the first time that we have been doing them under controlled conditions to tease things out. There are more things in life to worry about than that.

More about the puzzles of physics:

• Three win Nobel for discovering cosmic speedup
• Physics prize highlights puzzles
• Hidden universes revealed
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Close will make an appearance at Town Hall Seattle at 7:30 p.m. PT Friday to talk about his book and the Large Hadron Collider, and is due to visit Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Calif., at 7 p.m. PT Dec. 6.

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.

L. Taylor / T. McCauley / CMS / CERN

This graphic records proton collision events in the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid in which four high-energy electrons (shown as red towers) are observed. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but is also consistent with background processes.

The latest results from the Large Hadron Collider serve as a reality check for expectations that radical scientific discoveries are just around the corner. A month ago, folks were buzzing about prospects that the elusive Higgs boson might soon be found. This week, they're talking about how the Higgs boson, as well as other exotic ideas such as supersymmetry and superstring theory, might be merely a will o' the wisp.

Reservations about the imminent revolution in particle physics cropped up in the wake of last week's Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India. Some observers speculated that fresh results could confirm an anomalous "bump" in earlier data from the LHC's two main detectors, ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid.

Such a bump could suggest the mass-energy level where the Higgs boson was lurking. Detecting the Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle," has been the main goal of the $10 billion particle collider on the French-Swiss border. Physicists are anxious to see it because it would be the last fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model, one of physics' most successful theories. The Higgs mechanism could explain why some particles have mass while others don't.

Bye-bye, bump?
But instead of confirming the earlier bump in their data, researchers at Europe's CERN particle physics lab reported last week that "the significance of those fluctuations has slightly decreased." That led some observers to suggest that the Higgs boson "likely doesn't exist."

In fact, it's still too early to render a verdict. "Variations up and down on significance are to be expected," Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, author of a book on the LHC titled "The Quantum Frontier," told me in an email today. "The two conferences are only a month apart, and things don't change hugely between them."

So far, the most significant findings from the LHC are those that have virtually ruled out broad areas of the mass-energy spectrum where the Higgs might have been detected — mostly in the range between 145 billion and 466 billion electron volts, with 95 percent certainty. There's a better chance of finding the Higgs at lower masses, below 145 billion electron volts, but that's going to be a trickier challenge for the high-powered LHC.

Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director, put an optimistic spin on the non-findings, declaring that "these are exciting times for particle physics."

"Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months," he said. "If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics."

So long, supersymmetry?
That new physics could theoretically include supersymmetry and string theory, weird concepts that propose the existence of whole classes of yet-to-be-discovered particles (or "sparticles"). Such concepts represent a departure from the Standard Model, and for that reason physicists are looking closely for any anomalies that would open the way to new physics.

For those physicists, the latest data from the LHCb detector — which is particularly sensitive to matter-antimatter anomalies in the decay of B-mesons — might represent a bit of a letdown. Researchers reported in Mumbai that their measurements were "in agreement with the Standard Model prediction," although they said "there is still room for a new physics contribution."

A spokesperson for the LHCb experiment, Tara Shears of Liverpool University, told the BBC that her team's results "put supersymmetry on the spot." Other physicists are starting to wonder whether the concept will have to be discarded in favor of other exotic ideas, such as a fifth fundamental force known as technicolor.

For physicists, non-discoveries can be as valuable as discoveries. But if CERN's big machine doesn't produce some breakthrough physics, it's likely to be more difficult to sell taxpayers and politicians on the next big machine.

Years ago, CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis told me it "might be a little bit difficult to explain to our politicians, that here they gave us 10 billion of whatever, your favorite currency unit, and we didn't find the Higgs boson." Ellis and his colleagues don't have to provide that explanation just yet, but stay tuned. A year from now, physicists will either be struggling to explain the weird phenomena they're seeing ... or struggling to explain the absence of weird phenomena.

Update for 2 p.m. ET Sept. 1: The BBC's Pallab Ghosh revives hopes for the Higgs in a report saying that the "Higgs particle could be found by Christmas." Those expectations are based on a Quantum Diaries blog posting by University of Wisconsin researcher Richard Ruiz, who notes there's a chance that the LHC will collect enough data by the end of this year to make statistical judgments about whether the Standard Model's version of the Higgs exists or not over a broad range of possible masses.

Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, told the BBC, "We could discover the Standard Model version of the Higgs boson or exclude it earlier than expected. Could we discover it by Christmas? In principle, yes."

There are several caveats: First, the forecast assumes that data will keep flowing from the LHC at its current better-than-predicted rate. Second, researchers are shifting their focus to regions of the mass spectrum where the results are more difficult to interpret, and therefore physicists may require more data than they originally expected. And third, the projections apply only to the kind of Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model. A non-standard Higgs boson could still escape the net.

Fermilab's Lincoln says updated results from the LHC are due to be announced in mid-November at the Hadron Collider Physics symposium in Paris, so the situation may become clearer at that time. Stay tuned ... maybe we'll have something more definitive by Thanksgiving.

More about the LHC:

• Got a computer? Help out the atom smashers
• What's a hadron? Take a tour of the particle zoo
• Interactive: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider 

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The latest results from Europe's Large Hadron Collider have raised hopes among particle physicists that the elusive Higgs boson — also known as the "God Particle" — may be coming to light at last.

Sure, we've heard that before: Rumors about a possible detection at Fermilab's Tevatron, a particle collider near Chicago, have been circulating since last year, and just in the past few months there's been a rise and fall in expectations that the Higgs would turn up in the Tevatron's data.

Now the potential signature of the Higgs boson has turned up in an avalanche of data from both of the Higgs-hunting detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. The signature is not yet clear enough to constitute a discovery, but it suggests that the $10 billion particle collider, arguably the biggest and costliest science experiment on Earth, just might be on the right track.

"We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing," Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the science team behind the LHC's ATLAS detector, told The Guardian. Similarly intriguing results were reported by the team for the other detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS.

The two sets of findings were reported independently on Friday at the Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, one of the world's biggest particle-physics forums. The ATLAS and CMS teams have been sorting through billions upon billions of data points from proton collisions at the LHC, looking for the statistical signs that suggest Higgs bosons are being shaken free for tiny fractions of a second.

The newly reported analyses suggest that the type of Higgs boson predicted by Standard Model of particle physics could be turning up around the mass-energy level of 140 billion electron volts, or 140 GeV. That's about the same level reported by one of the Tevatron's research teams.

When it comes to statistical significance, the results are not yet solid enough to constitute a confirmed discovery. But the fact that multiple detectors at two colliders are coming up with similar "bumps" in their data is nevertheless generating excitement.

"No reputable scientist is going to tell you anything more than 'this is very, very interesting and we'll keep an eye on it.' But it is indeed very, very interesting," Fermilab's Donald Lincoln, a member of the CMS collaboration at the LHC as well as the Tevatron's DZero collaboration, told me in an email.

Some are not yet convinced. The University of Padua's Tommaso Dorigo, who is part of the CMS team as well as the Tevatron's CDF team, said he doesn't see "anything compelling" in regards to the Higgs' potential detection. Rather, he sees the results as more significant for identifying energy levels where the Standard Model Higgs almost certainly won't be found. But everyone who's in the know pretty much agrees that it won't be long before physicists can say definitively whether the kind of Higgs particle they've been looking for does or does not exist.

"While I'd hate to predict an exact date, it's pretty clear from the performance seen thus and the expected near future that the Higgs will be found or ruled out on a time scale of months or perhaps a year," said Lincoln, author of the book "The Quantum Frontier."

What's so big about the Higgs?
Detecting the Higgs boson would be a big deal: It's the main reason why the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first place.

The LHC circulates protons around a 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel on the French-Swiss border to nearly the speed of light, and smashes them together within the giant ATLAS and LHC detectors as well as other special-purpose detectors distributed around the collider ring.

The more exotic products of those collisions almost instantly decay into more common subatomic particles, but by analyzing the distributions, directions and velocities of those particles, physicists can theoretically untangle big mysteries ranging from the origins of the universe to the nature of dark matter and the potential existence of extra dimensions in the cosmos.

The Higgs boson, and its associated field, is one of those big mysteries. Back in the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs and others proposed the boson's existence as the answer to a theoretical question about the nature of particle mass.

It's long been known that some particles (such as the quarks and leptons that make up matter) have mass, while others (such as the photon) are massless. But there was no solid explanation for the difference.

Higgs and his colleagues suggested that a type of field  — analogous to a magnetic field — affected different particles in different ways, imparting mass to some particles but not to others.

In particle physics, fields are associated with force-carrying particles, which are put in a category of particles known as bosons. The particle associated with the Higgs field came to be known as the Higgs boson. Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman nicknamed it the "God Particle" because it played a central but subtle role in our conception of the cosmos. (Higgs and many other physicists hate the nickname.)

If the Higgs boson is found, and if it behaves in a manner consistent with the Standard Model, that would serve as an exciting validation of our current view of the structure of the cosmos. If the Higgs isn't found, or if it behaves in a non-standard way, that could be even more exciting. Physicists would have to go back to the drawing board and modify their explanation for the workings of the universe.

It's hard to predict how going back to the drawing board might affect the scientific world, or our everyday lives ... but the last time this sort of thing happened was a little more than a century ago, when quantum mechanics and relativity had to be invented to explain phenomena that just seemed weird to 19th-century physicists. These scientific paradigm shifts opened the way to innovations ranging from atom bombs and nuclear power to microwave ovens and lasers. So who knows where post-Standard Model physics might lead?

The details of discovery
Here's one more important thing to keep in mind: Discovering the Higgs won't be like discovering a new continent. Lots of numbers have to be crunched, and lots of statistics have to be analyzed to tease out the evidence for a previously undetected particle.

"It's much more like walking toward people in the fog, and waiting for the moment when you recognize the person you're looking for," Lincoln told me. The process that's playing out right now is probably the way discoveries work in 21st-century physics: First there are hints that something interesting might be going on, then more data are deciphered to confirm a discovery, and then physicists finally figure out how that knowledge can be put to use.

With that in mind, here's how Lincoln explains the slight "bump" seen in the newly reported data from the Compact Muon Solenoid:

M. Krammer et al. / CMS / CERN

This chart shows how data from the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid may suggest the existence (or non-existence) of the Higgs boson at particular mass-energy levels (on the horizontal axis, in terms of giga electron volts, or GeV).

"Take a look at the image above. There are a couple of important things. First, there's a horizontal red line. This is the Standard Model. If the black or blue line goes below the red line, the Standard Model version of the Higgs boson is ruled out for that mass. So, except for some wiggles, the Standard Model Higgs is ruled out from about 150 billion electron volts, or 150 GeV, to 460 or so.

"The thing that is getting people a little excited is the second feature. The dashed black line is how well we expect to do if the Standard Model is right, but the Higgs boson doesn't exist. When the blue and black lines start to drift away from the dashed black line, it means that we expect we can rule out more than we did. For instance, in this case, we expected to be able to rule out from about 125 GeV and up. But since the blue and black lines don't dip below the red lines until 145 or 150 or so, this could mean that we have more events than physicists would expect to see from the Standard Model without the Higgs. So that could mean there are some Higgs events floating around. The difference is biggest around 145 GeV or so.

"Now we get a reality check.  The green and yellow bands indicate our uncertainty in our expectations. So we see that the black and blue lines are at the edge of our uncertainty. Further, even in the region we are excluding (near 160 GeV), there is an excess (observed above expectation).

"This means (to me at least, and at this point it's all a matter of judgment) that it could be that the discrepancy reflects an imperfect understanding of the detector and algorithms.

"Still, all of the experiments sees an excess at some level, suggesting that either our theory has been implemented incorrectly or maybe something is going on. No reputable scientist is going to tell you anything more than 'this is very, very interesting and we'll keep an eye on it.' But it is indeed very, very, interesting.

"At the Lepton/Photon conference to be held in a month in Mumbai, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will hopefully combine their results, effectively doubling the amount of beam being used."

Now that you've gotten the hang of reading the data, here's the corresponding chart from the ATLAS detector.

The bracketed areas indicate mass-energy regions where the Standard Model Higgs has been excluded: 155 to 190 GeV and 295 to 450 GeV.

If you look ever so closely at the chart, you'll notice a slight elevation of the black line above the yellow zone of uncertainty at about 140 GeV, the same area where the CMS team detected the potential signature of a Standard Model Higgs boson:

K. Cranmer / NYU / ATLAS / CERN

This plot shows readings from the ATLAS detector that hint at mass-energy levels where the Standard Model Higgs boson might (and cannot) be found. The brackets indicate exclusion zones from roughly 155 to 190 GeV and from 295 to 450 GeV.

The bottom line? Something interesting may be going on in the world of physics, although there's still a chance that results or theories are being misinterpreted. Within the next year or so, we should know whether we're in the midst of a cosmic discovery. Stay tuned ...

Update for 6:05 p.m. ET July 25: The director general of the organization that hosts the LHC — known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN — says he expects the question of the Higgs boson's existence to be solved by the end of 2012. "I would say we can settle the question, the Shakespearean question — 'to be or not to be' — end of next year," Director General Rolf Heuer told reporters at the Grenoble conference.

Correction for 11:10 a.m. ET July 26: I've corrected the name of the ATLAS collaboration's spokeswoman, which I scrambled up as I was writing this item.  Mi dispiace! 

More about particle physics and the LHC:

• Interactive: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Interactive: Nightmares and dreams at the LHC
• What's a hadron? Your guide to the particle zoo
• Special Report: The Big Bang Machine

For more about the findings presented in Grenoble:

• CMS press release about the results
• CMS slide presentation
• CMS: "Search for Standard Model Higgs Boson in pp Collisions at √ s = 7 TeV"
• ATLAS: "Combined ATLAS Standard Model Higgs Search With 1 fb-1 of Data at 7 TeV"

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

Workers walk around the ATLAS detector's calorimeter during the Large Hadron Collider's winter maintenance period. The LHC's proton beams were restarted over the weekend.

After a winter maintenance break, Europe's Large Hadron Collider went back into operation this weekend, beginning a marathon that scientists hope will lead to theory-twisting breakthroughs.

Argonne National Laboratory's Thomas LeCompte, who is physics coordinator for the LHC's ATLAS detector, said the particle accelerator resumed shooting proton beams around its 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring on Saturday night. James Gillies, a spokesman for Europe's CERN nuclear research center, told me that proton-on-proton collisions could resume within a week.

During the next two years, the underground particle accelerator could produce data pointing to the nature of dark matter, or the discovery of a whole new class of unanticipated subatomic curiosities, or the existence of extra dimensions ... or the presence of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" that could explain why some particles have mass and others don't.

"By the end of next year, we hope very much that we will be able to say something about the Higgs," said Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at Europe's CERN nuclear research center.

String theory supported
Researchers are already able to say something about potentially new physics, coming out of just a few weeks' worth of lead-ion collisions in November. Those collisions created quark-gluon plasma, an exotic type of matter that existed just an instant after the big bang, said Yves Schutz, a CERN physicist who is part of the team behind the LHC's ALICE detector.

"We have produced in the laboratory the hottest matter ever, the densest matter ever," Schutz said today during a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington.

Previous experiments conducted at another particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider in New York, showed that quark-gluon plasma took on the form of a liquid. Some scientists expected the plasma to go to a gaseous state at the higher temperatures achieved by ALICE, but it didn't. Instead, it was a "perfect liquid, which flows without resistance and is completely opaque," Schutz said.

That in itself was a big surprise. But Schutz told me that the results were consistent with what had been predicted by a particular variant of string theory known as AdS/CFT correspondence, which also addresses such mysteries as quantum gravity and extra dimensions. "I'm surprised that they can make a prediction and that it matches what we measured," Schutz said.

String theory is a long-debated conception of the subatomic world that envisions matter as being composed of incredibly tiny strings or membranes that vibrate in an 11-dimensional universe. Skeptics have criticized the concept as being untestable and unfalsifiable, but if findings from the LHC can confirm some hypotheses and falsify others, that could increase string theory's acceptance.

Only the beginning
The collider is scheduled to run at its current energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam for 2011 and 2012, with a weeks-long maintenance break next winter that would be similar to the break that has just ended. At the end of 2012, the machine would be shut down for more than a year to get it ready to run at its full power of 7 TeV per beam.

Over the past year, the LHC's beams have been at 3.5 TeV, producing results that have confirmed decades' worth of findings from earlier particle accelerators. But the collisions have not yet yielded enough data to provide evidence for the exotic theories that scientists have suggested, Pauss said. LeCompte explained that the telltale signs of dark matter, microscopic black holes, supersymmetric particles or the Higgs boson are so rare that scientists have to search through huge amounts of data to find them — and then make sure that the evidence is rock-solid.

He compared the task to an oil-prospecting operation. "You might strike oil, but you haven't explored the whole field," LeCompte said.

By the end of 2012, scientists should have enough data to confirm or reject claims about the Higgs boson and the other oddities. If the Higgs is not found, that might force physicists to take a second look at the Standard Model, the theory of subatomic structure that ranks as one of physics' biggest achievements.

"We know the Standard Model is wrong at some level," LeCompte said. "We know that something lies beyond that. The Higgs is the simplest and most elegant way to push it to the next level, but nature may have something else in mind."

A good number of scientists say failing to find the Higgs boson at the LHC would actually be more intriguing than finding it — even though they admit it'd be hard to tell that to the politicians who have funded the $10 billion international project.

"If we don't see it, we will be very excited, because it means that there's something very brand-new," the University of Maryland's Nicholas Hadley, who is a member of the research team for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector, told journalists at today's news briefing. "But to say we looked and we didn't find anything ... we'll probably volunteer to have other people stand up here in front of you if that day comes."

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

A worker stands beneath the ATLAS detector's calorimeter during this month's maintenance break at the Large Hadron Collider.

The world's most powerful particle collider will be kept running through 2012 rather than taking next year off for an overhaul, Europe's CERN particle physics lab announced today. The change in plans means scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will have more time to track down the Higgs boson and other mysteries of the universe before the extended break — and it also means the machine should be shut down just in time for the Maya apocalypse.

Not that there's anything to the doomsday date. There's no reason why the world should end on Dec. 21, 2012, with or without the LHC. Some folks think dramatic, world-shattering changes will occur on that day because it marks the end of the Maya "long-count" calendar, but that myth has no basis in historical or cosmological reality. (And experts say the date may have been miscalculated, anyway.) Some folks also think the LHC could bring on doomsday by creating catastrophe-causing black holes or strangelets — but there's no evidence for that, either.

The real significance of the LHC's operation in 2012 is that scientists are so pleased with the way the machine has been running that they want to keep up the scientific momentum.

"With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there's a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year," Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director, said in today's news release. "For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC's current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp."

Right now, the LHC is closed for maintenance, but it's due to start up again in February. The new schedule, approved by the CERN's managers over the past few days, calls for operations to resume at the tried-and-true energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts per beam. CERN expects to increase the LHC's data collection rate by at least a factor of three over the next year, potentially allowing scientists to see the first hints of new phenomena by the end of the year. But one year would not provide enough time to "turn those hints into a discovery," CERN said.

So instead of shutting the LHC down for a yearlong series of upgrades, as previously planned, CERN said it would take a "short technical stop" at the end of 2011, then go back into operation for 2012. The big upgrades would be done during 2013, and in 2014 the LHC would be back in business at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam.

One of the LHC project's primary goals is to detect the Higgs boson, which is the only particle predicted by current theory that has yet to be found. The Higgs particle, along with its associated field, is thought to play a role in endowing some particles with mass while leaving others (such as photons) to go massless. Research at the LHC could shed new light on other fundamental questions as well: Are there whole classes of supersymmetric particles (or "sparticles") that have gone undetected to date? Might some of those sparticles account for dark matter, which can't be seen but can be detected by its gravitational influence? Is it possible that we live in a world of 10 or 11 dimensions? Why does it look as if matter won out over antimatter when the universe came into being? What's the nature of the primordial soup that existed just an instant after the big bang?

For more about the LHC and its role in solving the mysteries of the universe, delve into our special section about "The Big Bang Machine." And for more from the 2012 watch, check out these stories:

• Stressed by storms and supernovas?
• Solar cycle sparks doomsday buzz
• Alien invaders vs. the truth squad
• The end is not near 

If you're looking for an additional antidote to 2012 hysteria, check out 2012hoax.org. Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter. You'll even find a reference to 2012 hype in a chapter of my book, "The Case for Pluto."