// block 187467 · science · 4 July 2012
The Higgs boson announced
The moment this block marks: the start of the CERN seminar, 09:00 in Geneva, 4 July 2012, 07:00:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 187,467, 4 July 2012, 07:19:00 UTC.
On the morning of 4 July 2012, CERN opened a seminar in Geneva at which its two large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, presented their latest results in the search for the Higgs boson, the particle proposed in 1964 to explain how elementary particles acquire their mass. Physicists had queued through the night for a seat, and the seminar was relayed to a conference in Melbourne.
Each experiment reported, on its own, a new particle with a mass of about 125 GeV, seen with a significance of about five standard deviations, the threshold physicists use before they speak of a discovery. Peter Higgs, one of the theorists who had proposed the mechanism nearly half a century earlier, was in the room. The following year he and François Englert received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The first block mined after the seminar opened, block 187,467, came nineteen minutes in, while the results were still being presented and before the word discovery had been spoken in the room. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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