I remember it being this huge discovery but I never could find an explanation I understood.
In: Physics
The story goes that it wasn’t originally called the god particle but the “god d**ned” particle but some popular physics writers shortened it to the god particle and the name sort of stuck. Nothing to do with deities. The name of the particle is the Higgs boson.
Anyway, this delves deep into the standard model of particle physics which were developed over the 1950-60s and is still the most widely regarded model used today. (electrons etc) The Higgs boson was theorized along with the Higgs field and the reason it is important is that mass is the result of interaction of all other particles with the Higgs field. This was the “last” particle that was theorized to exist but not actually discovered in the standard model.
The problem was that the Higgs boson (which would lend credence to the Higgs field) would be at an energy level that could not be produced by the particle accelerators at that time. (perhaps why they called it “god d**ned” – it was out of reach)
One of the key reasons that the LHC was constructed was to (hopefully) generate the energy levels sufficient to find the Higgs boson which they finally did in 2013.
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