God Particle

The Higgs boson is frequently referred to as ‘the god particle’, a name adopted after Leon Lederman’s book. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, the Higgs boson is a particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles.

WHAT IS THE GOD PARTICLE?

The Higgs boson is frequently referred to as ‘the god particle’, a name adopted after Leon 

Lederman’s book. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, the Higgs boson is a 

particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles.

About Higgs boson

Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of 

particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. An experimental 

observation of it would help to explain how otherwise massless elementary particles cause 

matter to have mass. If it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the 

material world.

As of August 2011, the Higgs boson has yet to be confirmed experimentally,despite large 

efforts invested in accelerator experiments at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and 

Fermilab.  The Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to vector bosons, was theorized in 

August 1964 by François Englert and Robert Brout (“boson scalaire”);in October of the same 

year by Peter Higgs, working from the ideas of Philip Anderson; and independently by Gerald 

Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, who worked out the results by the spring of 1963. 

The three papers written on this discovery by Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Higgs, Brout, and Englert

 were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary 

celebration.

How is Higgs boson important?

It plays a key role in the standard model of physics (the theory on which physicists base their 

whole understanding of matter), proving the existence or absence of the Higgs boson 

could change the entire foundation of physics, indicating the existence of particles and forces 

not yet imagined and paving the way for an entirely new set of laws.

“The Higgs boson is interesting because it is the only reasonable explanation we have for 

the origin of mass,” says Dave Rainwater, a researcher at FermiLab. “Without the Higgs, all 

fundamental particles would be massless, and the universe would be very different. The 

weak nuclear forces wouldn’t be weak at all, for instance, so the elemental composition 

of the cosmos would be radically different, stars would shine differently, and we probably 

wouldn’t exist.”

And the payoff for whoever discovers the Higgs boson? Nothing less than a Nobel Prize.

 “Its discovery would be one of the crowning achievements of modern science, and 

validate decades of intense research,” says John Conway, a professor at Rutgers

Why does the ‘God Particle’ matter?

The answer is actually in the question.  The God Particle, or Higgs Boson as it is scientifically 

referred to, is a hypothetical particle which physicists believe gives atomic particles, and 

as a result everything else, mass.  Physicists across the globe are conducting experiments

 to try and prove  it’s existence.  Right now, nobody knows why particles acquire mass, 

and that is a hole that has existed in the standard model for 50 years.

In the 1960s several groups of physicists, including Peter Higgs, separately came up with

 the complicated idea of how particles acquire mass. A field, now knows as the Higgs Field, 

is thought to interact with the Higgs boson. It is in this interaction where particles are 

believed to acquire mass. This is kind of important since without this interaction science can’t

 accurately explain why the galaxy is what it is. And as explained in a briefing paper from 

CERN, “The universe would be a very different place…. no ordinary matter as we know it, no 

chemistry, no biology, and no people”.

So science shall hunt for the Higgs boson as it fills a hole and helps reinforce the standard 

model for particle physics. It will show that physicists are on the right track. The answer, if it is 

proven correct will finally tell physicists why particles have mass.  Which tells them why these 

particles come together to create atoms, which in turn creates matter.

How is the God Particle found?

In very simple terms, physicists have to break stuff to find stuff. They get to use the scientific 

principles of a 2 year old toddler and smash things together to see what comes off…..albeit in 

a much more controlled environment.

Particle physicists have a fun job. Sure they are dealing with some very heady principles, and 

are trying to prove what has been postulated after years of thought experiments and enough 

math to make an intelligent person go insane, but ultimately they are trying to break things to 

find the smallest parts that they can. They use real big tools to do it too. The most famous is the 

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (well part of it is in France 

as well) is an underground ring measuring 17 miles in circumference.  It’s designed to take 

two opposing beams of particles, accelerate them to just under the speed of light and 

smash them into each other. These collisions, although small, are very powerful.  

The explosions are aimed to occur within very large detectors that try to capture the 

evidence of subatomic particle, which decay very quickly.

As you might imagine these are not experiments that can be conducted inside university labs 

due to the size of the tools and the cost to operate them. Consider that the entire 17 mile ring 

is lined with very expensive super conducting magnets each kept just above absolute zero, 

and the energy needed to accelerate the beams to near the speed of light, that these are not 

tests to be conducted on a shoestring budget.  The LHC had a construction budget of over 7 

billion euros, which makes it one of the most expensive machines ever constructed.

So using these big expensive machines, top particle physicists break stuff in the hopes that

what falls out can be identified to help explain the questions of the universe. Simple and heady.

Source: http://godparticle.com/blog/