THE God particle has visited the blogosphere. In recent weeks,
particle physicists at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have been
writing breathless blogs describing how they might have found
the particle thought to give everything in the universe its mass
- the Higgs boson. All are cautious: no claims of discovery are
being made, but other physicists are speculating that what is
being seen is significant. John Conway and colleagues at
Fermilab are looking beyond the standard model - the best
description we have of fundamental particles and the
interactions between them. Using the Tevatron accelerator, they
are searching for a Higgs boson predicted by supersymmetry, a
rival scheme which posits that every standard-model particle has
a heavier "super-partner". Their research hints at a particle
with a mass of about 160 gigaelectronvolts (see "Glimpses of the
God particle?"). Such signals have a habit of disappearing. In
1984, the Nobel laureate ... To continue reading this article,
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