Physics, Earth & Space Icon Physics, Earth & Space

Higgs Boson “God Particle” Found!

It was behind the couch with the foldout bed in the living room that’s so heavy we almost never move it even to vacuum. But seriously, and let’s have a little respect here, there’s supposedly going to be some big announcement Tuesday from Geneva’s CERN laboratory with its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Fox News reports:

The announcement, planned for 8 a.m. EST (2 p.m. CET), will address the status of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, sometimes called the “God Particle” because of its importance to science.
This particle, which has long been theorized but never detected, is thought to give all other particles mass. Scientists at the LHC have been hoping that when protons inside the machine collide together at extremely high speeds, the energetic explosions that result will create the Higgs.

Actually, the only reason, that we can tell, that the Higgs boson is called the God Particle is because Leon Lederman wrote a book on the subject in the 1990s and the publisher gave it that title. It wasn’t even Lederman’s title choice. He wanted to call it the Godd–n Particle, perhaps because it’s so hard to detect. Talk about branding over substance.