A LEADING SCIENTIST involved in the Large Hadron Collider project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland has said that the discovery of the Higgs boson, or so-called ‘god particle’, may be well ahead of schedule.

Dr Steve Myers, director of accelerators and technology at Cern, said that progress on the project had been so good that the goal of uncovering the theoretical Higgs boson – a particle thought to be the missing link in explaining life – may happen sooner than thought.

Speaking at Trinity College Dublin last night, Myers said that the project had exceeded expectations since it launched in September 2008, reports the Irish Times.

The project works by particles being placed in the collider and then accelerated to almost the speed of light and smashing them together; particle physicists working at Cern then monitor the results in the hope that of finding the existence of the Higgs boson which, it is thought, could unravel the mysteries of existence by showing how objects achieve mass.

Myers described the past year as “exceptional” and said that the collider will continue to operate until the end of 2012, instead of being shut down at the end of this year as planned. While the collider was originally scheduled to be shut down at the end of 2011 to allow it to be switched back on in 2014, Myers said that progress had been so good that “the performance of the detectors and of the machine means that even at a lower energy we could discover the Higgs or disprove its existence”.

Read More: Hadron Collider generates ‘mini-Big Bang’ >