Paris, Tuesday, September 19, 2000 Glimpse of 'God Particle' Reported Atom-Smasher Upgrade on Hold as Physicists Pursue Object
By Curt Suplee Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - Officials at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, the giant European atom-smasher center outside Geneva, have decided to delay the start of construction on the $6 billion Large Hadron Collider - to be the most powerful particle accelerator ever built - because scientists there may already have observed one of the phantom objects the new project was designed to find. That entity is so important that a Nobel physics laureate, Leon Lederman, calls it ''the God particle.'' It lies at the heart of one of the most important mysteries of modern science: What mechanism in nature confers the property of mass on all the stuff in the universe?