(CNN) -- Two professors, both alike in dignity, in fair Geneva where we lay our scene. When it is finally written, the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our age may begin something like this. Last month, two eminent professors -- Peter Higgs and Francois Englert -- were jointly awarded one of sciences greatest honours: the Nobel Prize in Physics. The award came on the back of the dramatic announcement last year that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based in Geneva, had made an astonishing discovery: a new particle, a Higgs Boson, had been comprehensively proven to exist. Read: How Google aims to solve death (The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva last year confirmed the existence of a Higgs Boson, popularly known as the \God particle\. The discovery led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert) Physicists around the world rejoiced -- some wept openly. Years of speculation, theory and research had suddenly been validated. In typical Scandinavian understatement, Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said This years prize is about something small that makes all the difference. The discovery came as a major puzzle piece in the way physicists understand the universe. The Standard Model of physics, which some regard as a theory of almost everything suffered from a significant missing link before the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Now there seemed to be a reason why particles have mass; now we had a key to understanding our 4% of the universe and perhaps access to understanding the other 96% of the universe as well. But just as one set of answers were being revealed, more questions immediately presented themselves. CNN Labs spoke to some of the worlds top physicists about what the discovery of the Higgs Boson means, and what questions now need to be addressed.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 19:35:53 +0000
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