"Cutting back on science is cutting back on the future, especially that of young people". So adamant was the General Director of the CERN, Rolf Heuer, during his visit today to the University of Oviedo. The German physicist offered a conference at the Main Hall to members of the university community to explain the main lines of research and the challenges taken by the thousands of scientists who work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Rector Vicente Gotor welcomed Professor Heuer in his office, accompanied by the Vice-Counselor for Culture, Alejandro Calvo, and the General Director of Universities, Miriam Cueto. The director of the group for High Energy Experimental Physics of the University of Oviedo, Javier Cuevas, was in charge of presenting the Director of the CERN.

The Asturian researchers have been collaborating with the Swiss laboratory for more than two decades and Rolf Heuer praised their work at the CMS experiment and the role played by some Asturian businesses in the mechanical aspect of the construction of the Large Hadron Collider.

Doctor Heuer made it very clear that investing in research and cooperation between countries is essential to guarantee a higher and better quality of life, helped by scientific discoveries. The next few months, claimed Heuer, will be decisive to confirm that the particle discovered last summer is indeed Higgs boson.

In relation to this matter, he said that scientists now have three times as much information about this particle than when they revealed the discovery to the public, and that these new data will be "very important" to determine "whether it is only one subject or a family of bosons".

The CERN team hopes that this confirmation can be a turning point in the search for the reasons behind human existence or what dark matter is and how it behaves. "We hope this can be a ray of light that illuminates 95% of the Universe that we ignore", he explained.