Higgs Boson 'God Particle' nominated as TIME Person of the Year

One of the most talked about discoveries of the scientific community this year--the Higgs boson, or the "God particle"--could be selected as the Time Person of the Year.

The particle, whose discovery was announced on July 4 by scientists in Geneva, is one of 38 nominees that were chosen by Time as possible frontrunners for their coveted Person of the Year award.

TIME began selecting Person of the Year--an issue which features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that the magazine dubs as having the most influence on the events of the year--in 1927.

The Higgs boson particle fills the gap in helping scientists understand how atomic matter gains mass. Scientists finally found evidence of its existence this year at the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland.The particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs.

As Caltech physicist Sean Carroll explained in "The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World," everything in the known universe moves through the Higgs field.

Without the Higgs, Carroll says, " electrons and quarks would be massless, just like photons, the particles of light. They would move at the speed of light themselves, and it would be impossible to form atoms and molecules much less life as we know it.... Without it, the world would be an utterly different place."

As the Pasadena News reports, should either the particle or the Mars rover win, it would not mark the first time that a non-person had been selected by TIME to be featured on their magazine as Person of the Year. Time chose "The Computer" as Machine of the Year in 1982, and "Endangered Earth" was Planet of the Year in 1988.

Last year's TIME Person of the Year cover selected "The Protestor", symbolic for the numerous global protest movements around the world, including the Arab Spring, the Tea Party Movement, Occupy Wall Street, and protests in Russia, Greece and India, to name a few.