This excerpt from PhysOrg.com..
My money is on the possibility that they won't find it, and with other developments like LENR, the high-energy physics community will need to rethink their precious theories! The Paradigms are a Changin'. -Mark ============== Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalizing hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year. Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson -- if it exists -- represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics. "At this moment we don't see any evidence for the Higgs in the lower mass region where it is likely to be," said physicist Howard Gordon, deputy US ATLAS operations program manager. "I think it is true that the hints that we saw in July are not as significant -- they weren't very significant in July -- but they have gotten less significant now," Gordon told AFP. However, physicists are not ready to rule out the possibility that it exists, and atom-smasher experiments must still sift through an immense amount of data at the low-end of the spectrum, he said. "Basically the data has increased by about a factor of two since the report from the European Physical Society meeting in July because the Large Hadron Collider is producing lots of data," Gordon said. "I think it has always been a possibility that the Higgs would not be there but I don't think we are ready to say that at this moment." A statement summarizing the latest data, released at a conference in Mumbai, India, said the LHC's "ATLAS and CMS experiments excluded with 95 percent certainty the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region from 145 to 466 GeV." CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci whether the particle exists or not, scientists expect to know more by next year. "Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics," said Bertolucci. ==================