Higgs Boson, the God Particle, Explained

On July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson — a discovery described by physicists as one of the most significant in the history of the field, completing the Standard Model of particle physics that had been developed through the second half of the twentieth century.

The Higgs boson, theorized by Peter Higgs and others in 1964, is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field — an invisible field that permeates all of space and that, through its interactions with other particles, gives those particles their mass. Without mass, particles cannot form atoms; without atoms, matter as we experience it — including everything that makes up stars, planets, and living beings — cannot exist. The Higgs field is, in this sense, why anything has the weight and substance it does.

The "God particle" nickname, which most physicists dislike, came from the title of a book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, who reportedly wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle" for its elusiveness before his publisher declined. The name stuck in popular discourse despite physicists' objections to its grandiosity.

Finding the Higgs required the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a seventeen-mile circular tunnel in which protons are accelerated to near the speed of light and smashed together at energies sufficient to recreate conditions similar to those that existed shortly after the Big Bang. The collisions produce showers of particles that detectors photograph and analyze. The Higgs appears only briefly before decaying into other particles, requiring enormous data sets to identify statistically.

Peter Higgs and François Englert, who had independently developed the theoretical framework, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.