British physicist Peter Higgs gestures during a press conference on the sideline of his visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, April 7, 2008. Higgs said he expects proof will be found soon of an all-pervading force giving mass to the universe and making life possible - existence of which he predicted over 40 years ago. [Agencies]

Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson", which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.

"The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told journalists.

The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.

Finding the Higgs boson would prove this theory right.

CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to simulate conditions at the time of that primeval inferno by smashing particles together at near light-speed and so unlock many secrets of the universe.

Higgs was in Geneva to visit CERN for the first time in 13 years in advance of the launch.

Scientists at the centre hope the process will produce clear signs of the boson, dubbed the "God particle" by some, to the displeasure of Higgs, an atheist.

He came up with his theory to explain why mass disappears as matter is broken down to its smallest constituent parts - molecules, atoms and quarks.

The normally media-shy physicist, who has spent most of his career at Scotland's Edinburgh University, postulated that matter was weightless at the exact moment of the Big Bang and then much of it promptly gained mass.

（Agencies/China Daily）

Vocabulary:

Large Hadron Collider：大型强子对撞机。世界上最大的粒子加速器，是一个长为26.6公里的混凝土环形轨道，位于阿尔卑斯山法国和瑞士边界地下175米处。