Getting a grip on Higgs 'could take years'

6 Jul 2012, 5:44 pm   -   Source: AAP

The Higgs boson particle may have been found, but it'll be years before we can say what it does.

The elusive "God particle" may have been found, but it could take years before we fully appreciate what the discovery means.

The process of identifying all the properties of the Higgs boson particle could take some time, according to European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

"You have to pin down ... if everything is according to expectation, or if it's a bit different," Professor Heuer said in Melbourne on Friday.

"If it's a different, then the physics will be completely different, and that will take a few years, unfortunately. But that's science."

But Prof Heuer said the general public was becoming accustomed to the steady pace of scientific experimentation.

"People see ... that you don't get a result from today to tomorrow, (and) it takes a lot of time and a lot of stamina to develop methods and come up with an experiment," he said.

CERN researchers this week finally confirmed the existence of a particle thought to be the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle because it imparts mass to matter.

The discovery is considered a major breakthrough in physicists' quest to understand how the universe was created.

A jet-lagged Prof Heuer made the journey from CERN headquarters in Geneva to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne on Friday.

Chancellor Elizabeth Alexander said Prof Heuer's work with the Large Hadron Collider project in Geneva had done an invaluable service for science worldwide.

"The research at the Large Hadron Collider is potentially of momentous importance to us all," she said.

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