Last month researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) electrified not only their colleagues but also much of the world by reporting that their experiments have yielded “tantalizing hints” of the hypothetical Higgs boson. Cosmologists call the Higgs boson the “Holy Grail” of their discipline.
Achieving this Grail quest would confirm the existence of “the Higgs field” (named after Peter Higgs, the physicist who proposed it in 1964). Scientists hypothesize that, as the early universe cooled, massless particles passed through the Higgs field, acquiring mass and taking on shape. As BBC Newsnight put it, the Higgs field explains “why there’s something rather than nothing.” For this reason some journalists have called the Higgs boson “the God particle.”
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