eli5: what is a god particle?
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The “god particle” was sort of a pop-science term given to the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle (meaning it is not made up of smaller particles) in the Standard Model (our best current model for describing elementary particles).
This isn’t super ELI5, but in the Standard Model, elementary particles aren’t really objects like tiny balls. Instead, it’s more like space is filled with all these different fields with different properties, and the particles are “excitations” of that field (sort of points of high energy). So a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field.
Back in the 50s, a guy named Higgs and his colleagues proposed a way to explain why some particles have mass and others don’t. He described a field (later called the Higgs field) which some particles interact with, gaining mass. If the field existed though, then there should be a particle associated with it — just like with the photon and the electromagnetic field. The Higgs Boson was pretty elusive though, because it very quickly decays into other particles. It took until 2013 for CERN to announce that they had actually measured its existence experimentally in the Large Hadron Energy Collider.
I believe the idea behind the nickname “god particle” has to do with its role in creating mass from none, and therefore its role in creating the physical universe as we know it.
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