The Knoxville News Sentinel covered UT’s involvement in the discovery of the ‘God particle.’ UT physicist Stefan Spanier has spent the last decade at UT and the last six years or so working with the European Center for Nuclear Research in its attempt to find the Higgs boson particle — described as the missing piece in a decades-old physics theory that establishes the building blocks of the universe. “People bet a lot money on it to build the accelerator to look for it,” Spanier said, referring to the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which smashes atoms together at nearly the speed of light. “Now we have a concise description on how these building blocks make up a lot of the world around us. It’s a very important thing.”