The Big Bang – or not?

It has been nicknamed the “God particle”, and it is the keystone of modern physics. Without it, science’s best explanation for the nature of the universe would come crashing down.

The Higgs boson, first postulated in the Sixties by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, is certainly among the most elegant ideas in the history of physics, but it has one small problem. Nobody knows whether it actually exists.

Excitement has been mounting in boffin-land, because in a few months we should finally find out. Set in the shadow of the Jura mountains, on the border between France and Switzerland, a 17-mile (27km) tunnel as long as the Circle Line has just been sealed shut. Inside the tunnel is a $4 billion machine known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful atom-smasher.

When it starts operating next year, it will fire streams of protons against one another at close to the speed of light, releasing huge bursts of energy that will re-create the conditions that prevailed at the dawn of time, shortly after the Big Bang.

This, scientists fervently hope, should allow them their first glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is important because it provides an explanation for why matter has mass – and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and human beings. Professor Higgs’s ingenious solution was that the universe is permeated by a field of bosons (a type of particle), which consist of mass but little else. His theory also predicted that they could be observed only at very high energies – hence the need for an atom-smasher. A previous, less powerful accelerator at CERN, the European particle physics lab, found hints of its existence, but the new circuit should now rule it in – or out.

What if the God particle is a false god? That would mean much of what modern physicists think they know is mistaken. The denouement will also settle a famous wager. Seven years ago, when it looked like the LHC’s predecessor might find the Higgs, Professor Stephen Hawking was not convinced. He bet Gordy Kane, of the University of Michigan, $100 that the boson would not be found.

Professor Hawking, who is among the minority of physicists and cosmologists who think the Higgs is probably imaginary, won the first round, and a cheque. Dr Kane, however, is confident he is about to get his money back. Mark Henderson

The return of the bonkbuster

The bonkbuster is back, rising loud and blinging from the pastel pink ashes of chicklit. The paperbacks will be as chunky as ever. Burnished covers, brash heroines and Byzantine bonking plots will return with a vengeance – and added girl power.

Conveniently, the extra-large handbag of 2008 will be able to carry any number of the latest authors: Olivia Darling’s Vintage appears in March, and Jo Rees’s Platinum in May with the classic cover line “Hell hath no fury like three women scorned”. Plus, there is sure to be more from the hotly tipped Tasmina Perry, who led the bonkbuster revival with the bestselling Daddy’s Girls and Gold Diggers.