The potential discovery of the Higgs boson is a gateway to a new era that could see humanity unlock some of the universe’s great mysteries, like dark matter and light-speed travel, scientists have claimed.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled information from the Large Hadron Collider Wednesday “consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson,” an elusive particle thought to help explain why matter has mass.

Scientists went into a frenzy following the announcement, speculating that it could one day make light-speed travel attainable by “un-massing” objects or enable large items to be launched into space by “switching off” the Higgs.

CERN scientist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never ever have imagined its future applications.

“What’s really essential for the Higgs is that it explains how the planet could be the way that it is in the first millionth of a second in the Big Bang,” de Roeck stated.

“Can we apply it to some thing? At this moment my imagination is too modest to do that.”

A representation of traces of a proton-to-proton collision measured in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experience in the search for the Higgs boson.

Physicist Ray Volkas stated “almost everybody” was hoping that, rather than fitting the so-named Normal Model of physics — a theory explaining how particles fit with each other in the Universe — the Higgs boson would prove to be “something a bit different.”

“If that was the situation that would point to all sorts of new physics — physics that may well have something to do with dark matter,” he stated, referring to the hypothetical invisible matter thought to make up considerably of the universe.

“It could be, for instance, that the Higgs particle acts as a bridge between ordinary matter, which makes up atoms, and dark matter, which we know is a very crucial component of the universe.”

“That would have really wonderful implications for understanding all of the matter in the universe, not just ordinary atoms,” he added.

Sources and more information:

• ‘God particle’ a gateway to new vision of universe

Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General, second right, Fabiola Gianotti, ATLAS experiment spokesperson, left, and Joe Incandela, CMS experiment look at a screen during a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday,…

• It’s a boson! But we need to know if it’s the Higgs

• What Finding the Higgs-Boson Means

• LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson