Higgs Boson – Why It’s Called the God Particle

In 2012, the world’s biggest physics experiment made headlines: scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson. The media called it the “God Particle” — but what is it really?

The Higgs boson is linked to the Higgs field, an invisible energy field that fills the universe. Without this field, particles like electrons and quarks wouldn’t have mass — they’d just zoom around at the speed of light, unable to form atoms, stars, or people.

Detecting the Higgs was incredibly hard. It’s unstable, decaying into other particles almost instantly. To create it, scientists smashed protons together at nearly the speed of light, sifting through billions of collisions to find a handful of events that matched its predicted signature.

The nickname “God Particle” was popularized by physicist Leon Lederman to draw attention (and sell books), but many scientists dislike it because it’s misleading — the Higgs doesn’t have anything to do with religion.

Its discovery completed the Standard Model of particle physics, confirming a decades-old theory. But it also opened new questions: Why does the Higgs have the mass it does? Could there be more Higgs-like particles?

The Higgs boson reminds us that even the most fundamental properties of the universe can have hidden and surprising origins.

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