Belfast born engineer at CERN believes God particle will be discovered within months

Search for the origins of the universe tantalizingly close

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Dr Stephen Myers, director of accelerators and technology at CERN, with the LHC in the background.

Photo by CERN

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An Irishman is at the center of an international study to unravel the secrets of the universe. West Belfast-born engineer Doctor Stephen Myers is director of accelerators and technology at the world famous Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland and he has predicted this week that one of the key secrets of the universe will be uncovered in a matter of months.

According to the Irish Times, Myers told an engineers’ conference in Belfast this week that the evidence for the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson particle (the so-called God particle) first proposed in 1964 could be discovered by August or perhaps by October at the latest.

The Higgs boson is the final 'big building block' in the quest to discover how to explain mass said Doctor Myers, during his keynote lecture to the Engineers Ireland conference at the Europa Hotel in Belfast. 'It completes the standard model for mass,' he added.

During the course of his lecture on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Doctor Myers told Irish engineers that the current historic experiments at the collider should determine whether the Higgs boson particle does or does not exist. Meyers added that he personally believed the evidence would be found and that this would provide further crucial insights into the Big Bang, or the creation of the universe, that scientists believe happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

'If it does not exist there will be enough data to show that the Higgs is excluded and that there must be another mechanism for mass. I am confident that we will find the Higgs by August or September of this year,' Myers said, adding that a very high standard of proof was required. 'You only declare a discovery when you can say there is only a one in a million chance that you are wrong,' he added. Myers said he believed that Cern would establish proof for the Higgs boson particle to a standard of a 'one in two million chance of being wrong.'

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